Author Archives: Paulo Martins

What Is Customer Lifecycle Management? 2024 Guide

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What Is Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the process of tracking and managing each phase of a customer’s interaction with a business.

It starts from awareness and continues through to purchase and loyalty.

Businesses assign metrics to each stage and analyze these metrics to measure performance.

This helps them understand how well they are meeting customer needs.

Key Stages of CLM

  1. Awareness: Customers first become aware of a product or service.
  2. Consideration: Customers evaluate options and compare solutions.
  3. Purchase: Customers decide to buy a product or service.
  4. Retention: Ensuring customers remain satisfied and continue to use the service.
  5. Loyalty: Building a strong, ongoing relationship with customers.

Benefits of CLM

  • Improved Customer Retention: By understanding each stage, businesses can better meet customer needs, leading to higher customer retention rates.
  • Increased Revenue: Tracking and optimizing each stage can lead to more successful sales and marketing strategies.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Businesses can make informed decisions based on metrics collected throughout the lifecycle.

Tools for CLM

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRM tools help manage interactions with current and potential customers. For a detailed guide on CRM systems, visit HubSpot’s CRM Guide.
  • Marketing Automation Software: These tools streamline marketing efforts, making it easier to target customers at different lifecycle stages.

Many companies use customer lifecycle marketing to personalize their approach and enhance customer experiences. This integration helps create a seamless journey from discovery to loyalty.

How Can Customer Lifecycle Management Improve Your Online Store Metrics?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) can significantly impact your online store performance by improving key metrics such as conversion rates and customer retention. Implementing effective strategies can lead to increased revenue and business growth.

What Metrics Should You Focus On?

Conversion Rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase. By tracking the customer lifecycle from awareness to loyalty, you can optimize each stage of the sales funnel.

Customer Retention: Keeping existing customers can be more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Focus on retention metrics to maximize lifetime value (CLV) and enhance profitability.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measure the effectiveness of your ads and email campaigns. A high CTR can indicate that your marketing strategy resonates with your target audience.

How Do You Implement Effective Strategies?

Developing effective CLM strategies involves a mix of target audience analysis, relevant content creation, and leveraging technology. Use social media platforms and SEO to boost your online presence.

Target Audience Analysis: Understand the needs and behaviors of your ideal customer. This can help tailor your marketing message to meet their specific goals and incentives, leading to more effective ad campaigns and promotions.

Technology: Employing tools like customer lifecycle management software can streamline your efforts. Tools such as EngageBay are useful for CRM, email marketing, and lead generation.

Content Creation: Produce relevant content that engages different stages of the customer lifecycle. This can improve retention and loyalty metrics by continuously providing value.

By focusing on these key metrics and strategies, businesses can effectively enhance their online store performance and ensure sustainable growth.

What Are The Key Stages In Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer lifecycle management includes several crucial stages that help businesses build strong relationships with their customers. These stages ensure that a customer’s journey is smooth, from initial contact to retention and advocacy.

What Is The Acquisition Stage?

The acquisition stage focuses on attracting new customers. This involves creating awareness about the brand through marketing efforts such as advertisements, social media campaigns, and referral programs. Businesses aim to reach potential customers and persuade them to make their first purchase. Effective acquisition strategies can significantly enhance customer lifetime value.

During this stage, companies analyze data to understand what attracts customers. They use this information to optimize their marketing campaigns. An important metric to track in this phase is the cost per acquisition (CPA), which helps businesses measure the efficiency of their marketing spend.

What Is The Retention Stage?

The retention stage is about keeping existing customers engaged and satisfied. After the initial purchase, businesses aim to build loyalty through exceptional service, loyalty programs, and consistent communication. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, increasing their lifetime value and contributing to long-term success.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are key metrics in this stage. Tools such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and customer retention rates help businesses assess their performance. Implementing feedback loops allows for continuous improvement and ensures that customers feel valued and heard. By focusing on retention, companies can reduce churn and foster brand loyalty.

How To Analyze Customer Behavior?

Analyzing customer behavior involves using various tools and focusing on key data points to understand how customers interact with a business. It’s essential for improving customer experience and making informed business decisions.

What Tools Should You Use?

To analyze customer behavior, businesses should employ a combination of analytics platforms, CRM systems, and customer feedback tools.

Analytics platforms such as Google Analytics track website interactions, giving insights into how visitors navigate and what content holds their interest. CRM systems gather data from various touchpoints, creating detailed customer profiles and tracking engagement across the customer journey. Customer feedback tools, like surveys and online reviews, provide direct insights into customer experiences and expectations.

Using these tools collaboratively can help businesses create a comprehensive customer journey map, highlighting pain points and opportunities for improvement. They facilitate personalized recommendations and targeted marketing efforts, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Which Data Points Are Most Important?

When analyzing customer behavior, several data points are crucial for gaining valuable insights.

Demographic information helps in segmenting customers and tailoring personalized marketing strategies. Behavioral data, such as pages visited, time spent on the website, and products viewed, provides insights into customer interests and desires. Transaction history reveals purchasing patterns and preferences, guiding inventory management and product recommendations.

Customer feedback is vital for understanding customer satisfaction and identifying areas needing improvement. Engagement metrics, including email open rates and social media interactions, show how well marketing efforts resonate with the audience.

Customer journey maps help visualize all interactions and events, recognizing key touchpoints and stages in the customer lifecycle map. By analyzing these data points, businesses can make well-informed decisions to meet and exceed customer expectations, resulting in a better overall customer experience.

What Are Common Mistakes To Avoid In Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer lifecycle management involves tracking customer interactions and improving their experience. Avoiding common mistakes can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Are Examples Of Ineffective Strategies?

One major mistake is neglecting to use proactive customer service. Relying solely on reactive measures can lead to customer churn. Instead, businesses should anticipate issues and offer solutions before customers face problems.

Failing to personalize customer interactions is another error. Using generic messages instead of tailored recommendations can alienate loyal customers. Companies should leverage data to provide relevant content and exclusive offers.

Ignoring self-service tools is also a common pitfall. Many customers prefer to resolve issues on their own using FAQs, tutorials, or live chat support. Not offering these options can frustrate customers and increase support costs.

How Do You Identify And Rectify Mistakes?

Identifying mistakes involves regularly analyzing customer feedback and interaction data. Tools like surveys and support tickets can reveal pain points. Monitoring these metrics helps pinpoint areas needing improvement.

Rectifying these errors requires implementing best practices. For instance, introducing proactive support efforts or enhancing self-service tools can mitigate issues. Offering exclusive offers and personalized discounts can also improve customer relationships.

Engaging in consistent competitor analysis ensures that your strategies remain competitive. Observing how competitors handle customer lifecycle management can provide insights into effective practices and areas of improvement.

Frequently Asked Questions

This section addresses common inquiries about Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM), outlining key differences with CRM, stages involved, practical examples of implementation, and importance for strategy.

How does customer lifecycle management differ from customer relationship management?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) focuses on the entire journey of the customer, from awareness to advocacy. Unlike Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which mainly handles the ongoing relationship and interactions, CLM tracks and optimizes each stage of the customer journey to improve satisfaction and retention. For more details, visit Customer Lifecycle Management.

What are the primary stages involved in the customer lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle usually includes five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. Each stage represents a different phase of the customer’s interaction with a business. Managing these stages effectively can help in increasing customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business.

Can you provide examples of how businesses implement customer lifecycle management?

Businesses implement CLM using various strategies like personalized marketing campaigns, automated email sequences, and customer feedback systems. For instance, a company might use customer lifecycle software to automate and track interactions, making it easier to provide tailored experiences at each stage.

Why is understanding the customer lifecycle important for business strategy?

Understanding the customer lifecycle allows businesses to tailor their marketing, sales, and support strategies to better meet customer needs at each stage. This comprehensive approach can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty, which is crucial for long-term success.

What strategies are effective for managing customers throughout their lifecycle?

Effective strategies for managing the customer lifecycle include personalized communication, targeted promotions, and data-driven insights. Offering excellent customer service at each touchpoint and regularly evaluating the effectiveness of strategies can significantly enhance customer experience and retention.

How is customer lifecycle management adapted for the banking industry?

In the banking industry, CLM involves personalized financial advice, tailored loan offerings, and proactive support services. Banks may use customer lifecycle management to track customer interactions and provide timely, relevant services to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Introducing Arena Community: Revolutionizing Website Engagement and Monetization

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We have some exciting news to share with you!

Arena is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest innovation, Arena Community. This all-in-one product is designed to enhance engagement and interaction on your website within minutes, providing a seamless experience for users and brands alike. 

Created to tend to multiple industries and segments, such as publishers and news media, sports and entertainment companies, and e-learning and e-commerce platforms, our solution provides an environment for brands to connect deeper with their audiences and increase revenue.

Alongside this, we are excited to unveil our newly revamped website, which offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface. In this article, we will explore the features and benefits of Arena Community and highlight the new enhancements on our website.

Arena Community: A Comprehensive Community Engagement Solution

Arena Community is designed to bring together various elements of community engagement into a single, cohesive platform. Here are some of the key features and solutions it offers:

1. All-in-one Engagement Hub

Arena Community unites all of our SaaS products – Live Blog, Group Chat, and Commerce AI, allowing our customers to create permanent and temporary online communities within their website, with social stream feeds that keep the conversation going. 

Real-Time Chat and Messaging

Ignite real-time conversations for live events and community discussions with Arena Live Chat. Gather first-party data and gain deeper insights into your audience by allowing users to create their profiles to access the chat and other features.

Dynamic Live Blog 

Increase traffic and user retention by offering a dynamic social stream feed within your website, uniting the Live Chat feature to boost engagement and allow conversations to flourish naturally. 

Keep your audience updated by publishing various content formats – such as videos, texts, GIFs, images, and more – directly on your Arena Community Live Blog and create your own content hub.

Interactive Polls and Quizzes 

Engage your audience with interactive polls and quizzes that can be seamlessly integrated into live broadcasts, permanent pages, and standalone content.

Social Media Integration

Social media platforms are important tools for connecting with your audience, but they keep users divided into silos and don’t offer companies the ability to gain full access to user data. 

By connecting your social media accounts to your Arena Community, you can share content, engage with followers, and expand your reach without leaving the platform, bringing top-of-funnel audiences to the bottom of the funnel of your marketing strategy.

2. AI-powered Community

At Arena, we believe that AI is the perfect co-pilot to help make your everyday job easier while helping users stay informed and up-to-date. 

AI Search

Allow your audience to search exactly what they are looking for and gain instant access to summaries, links, posts, and key points of whatever has been published on your Arena Community. 

AI Feed Summary

Once users use Arena’s AI Search to look for a specific topic in your Community, our AI-powered Feed Summary instantly delivers a concise overview of all relevant updates and information necessary to be up-to-date on what’s going on in your content hub.

AI Post

Our AI Post works as an AI-powered RSS Feed, allowing you to integrate various social media accounts – whether they are yours or not – to automatically share the latest and most relevant social content into your Arena Community. This feature ensures that your users always have access to fresh content, building a seamless, social media-like experience.

AI Enhanced Content 

Let Artificial Intelligence help amp up your content production with Arena’s AI assistant. Simply provide a prompt detailing your needs, and our AI will generate your content from scratch. You can also ask the assistant to improve your content based on your preferences and user insights.

AI Moderation

Although you can manually moderate the content and comments shared by users on your Arena Community, you might not always have the time to. That’s why our platform comes with an integrated AI Moderation and AI-powered profanity filter. 

You can customize and expand the filter’s vocabulary as needed. Inappropriate messages and comments will be automatically edited, ensuring a respectful and engaging community environment.

AI Polls

Polls are a fantastic way to keep your readers engaged and increase participation on your website. While you can manually create polls, the AI Polls feature offers a time-saving alternative, generating dynamic polls based on the most recent content shared in your Community.

3. Improved User Experience

Customizable Community Spaces

Create branded community spaces that reflect your unique identity, offering a personalized experience for your users. Choose which features, content, layout and interactivity capabilities are more advantageous to your goals and will resonate with your audience the most.

Advanced Moderation Tools

Ensure a safe and respectful environment with robust moderation tools that allow for real-time monitoring and management of user interactions, guaranteeing your online community safety for all users.

Enhanced User Participation

Your audience wants to be part of your online community, and that goes beyond just reading and liking your posts. Allowing end users to create their own profiles and generate their own content on your platforms, enabling other users to comment, share and like the posts, helps create a social media-like experience, bringing your online community closer to each other and your brand. 

Companies that have chosen Arena Community for their websites saw an increase in 450% weekly retention, as well as 35% more time spent on site, all due to delivering a customer-focused experience for their audience.

4. Monetization Opportunities

Generate Leads

Arena Community enables you to turn anonymous visitors into identified customers, gather valuable customer information and utilize smart sales features to generate leads.

Monetization Manager 

Integrate Arena Community to your ads account and manage everything in one place. Use Arena AI to determine the best ad placements and layout, create sponsored content and partnerships with brands and influencers, and add conversion cards to take your users to affiliate links. 

Premium Content Access

Premium content allows for more personalized and exclusive interactions with your most dedicated followers. Offer exclusive content to your most dedicated users through subscription models, pay-per-view events, exclusive downloads and one-time purchases.

5. Analytics and Insights

First-party Data 

Bringing your audience to Arena Community allows you to gather valuable user insights directly with first-party data, enabling you to capture data for detailed profiles and segmentation. Ultimately, this will empower you to track the impact of key indicators for your business and measure your growth.

Comprehensive Analytics Dashboard

Gain valuable insights – such as page views, average session time and demographics – into user behavior, engagement metrics, and content performance with our detailed analytics dashboard.

Audience Segmentation

Tailor your content and engagement strategies with advanced audience segmentation tools that help you understand and target specific user groups.

Now that you understand the features and benefits of Arena Community for your brand’s digital strategy, let’s uncover some of the major updates we have made on our website.

Exploring the New Arena.im Website

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Our newly launched website has been designed with user experience in mind. Here are some of the key improvements and features:

Modern and Intuitive Design

  • Streamlined Navigation: Our new layout offers a more intuitive navigation experience, making it easier to find the information and tools you need.
  • Responsive Design: The website is fully responsive, ensuring a seamless experience across all devices, from desktops to mobile phones.

Comprehensive Resource Center

  • Educational Resources: Explore our extensive library of blog posts, tutorials, and guides designed to help you make the most of Arena Community and other Arena.im products.
  • Success Stories: Access our Customer Cases page and learn how Arena has helped customers from different industries to deliver top-notch community engagement solutions. 
  • Customer Support: Access our dedicated support center for assistance with any questions or issues, ensuring you have the help you need at every step.

Improved Product and Solution Pages  

  • Product Details: Scan through our product pages to understand how every product works and how it can help solve your community engagement challenges. 
  • Solution Pages: Learn how Arena solutions can be personalized for different industries and companies to build lasting relationships with your community. 

Do More With Less: Start Your Arena Community Today

Arena Community represents a significant leap forward in audience engagement and community building. With its comprehensive feature set and user-centric design, Arena Community helps you bring your audience from social media to your website. 

It has never been easier to foster deeper connections and drive meaningful interactions. Arena Community not only enhances audience engagement, but it also plays a crucial role in increasing conversions, by keeping your users engaged longer and transforming casual visitors into loyal customers. With Arena Community, your website becomes a dynamic hub where audience engagement translates directly into business growth.

We invite you to explore Arena Community and our new website to experience the future of engagement.

For more information, visit Arena.im.

Digital Products: How Publishers Can Increase Sales by Enhancing Engagement and Interactivity

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In the ever-evolving digital landscape, publishers face the challenge of standing out amidst a sea of content. One of the most effective ways to sell more digital products is by enhancing audience engagement and interactivity, besides incorporating branded content into your strategy. For this to work, it is necessary to understand and target your audience, offering a rich and engaging experience, and helping your brand to build loyalty with your customers.

So now, let’s uncover some of the secrets to selling digital products that resonate with your audience.

The Importance of Engagement, Interactivity, and Branded Content

Engagement, interactivity, and branded content are crucial for several reasons:

  • Increased Attention: Engaged users spend more time on your site, consuming more content and increasing the likelihood of making a purchase.
  • Higher Conversion Rates: Interactive elements such as quizzes, polls and Q&As, and live chats can lead to higher conversion rates as they make the user experience more dynamic and personalized.
  • Customer Loyalty: An interactive and engaging website fosters a sense of community and loyalty among users, encouraging repeat visits and purchases.
  • Brand Affinity: Branded content helps build a stronger connection with your audience by aligning your digital products with trusted brands, enhancing credibility and appeal.

Effective Strategies to Boost Engagement and Interactivity

  1. Interactive Content: Integrate interactive content such as quizzes, surveys, and polls. These not only engage your audience but also provide valuable insights into their preferences and behaviors. For instance, a quiz about a topic related to your digital products can lead to personalized product recommendations, increasing the likelihood of sales.
  2. Live Events and Webinars: Host live events, webinars, or Q&A sessions related to your digital products. These events provide an opportunity to showcase your products in action, answer questions in real-time, and build a deeper connection with your audience. Promote these events through your website and social media channels to attract a larger audience.
  3. Personalized Recommendations: Use data and analytics to offer personalized content and product recommendations. When users see products that are tailored to their interests and behaviors, they are more likely to make a purchase. Implementing algorithms that track user behavior and preferences can significantly enhance this personalization. Discover how you can gather first-party data and use it to your advantage. 
  4. Engaging Visuals and Multimedia: Utilize engaging visuals such as infographics, videos, and interactive graphics to make your content more appealing. Videos, in particular, can effectively demonstrate the value of your digital products, provide tutorials, or share customer testimonials.
  5. Gamification: Introduce gamification elements like badges, rewards, and leaderboards. Gamification can motivate users to engage more deeply with your content, participate in challenges, and ultimately make purchases to achieve higher status or rewards.
  6. Community Building: Create a sense of community by incorporating forums, discussion boards, and social media groups. Encourage users to share their experiences, provide feedback, and interact with each other. A strong community can significantly enhance user engagement and loyalty.
  7. Branded Content: Partner with reputable brands to create co-branded content. This can include sponsored articles, branded videos, or collaborative webinars. Branded content not only provides additional revenue through sponsorships but also enhances your credibility and expands your reach by tapping into the brand’s audience.

Leveraging Conversion Cards

One powerful tool to enhance engagement and drive sales is the use of Conversion Cards. Conversion Cards are interactive elements that can be embedded into your website to encourage specific actions from your audience. Here’s how they can help:

  • Donations: If your digital products include free content or you operate on a freemium model, you can use Conversion Cards to request donations. By offering value upfront and then asking for support, you can generate revenue while maintaining user trust and satisfaction.
  • Paid Subscriptions: Use Conversion Cards to promote your paid subscription services. Highlight the benefits and exclusive content available to subscribers, and offer a seamless way for users to sign up directly through the card.
  • Lead Generation: Capture email addresses and other contact information through Conversion Cards by offering something of value, such as an e-book, a discount code, or access to exclusive content. This helps build a database of potential customers who can be nurtured into paying customers.

Example of Effective Use of Conversion Cards

Let’s say you’re a publisher offering a range of digital products including e-books, online courses, and premium articles. You can embed Conversion Cards in your blog posts and product pages. For instance, at the end of a free article, you could have a Conversion Card that invites readers to donate to support more high-quality content. Alternatively, you could offer a discount on your next e-book purchase for users who sign up for your newsletter through a Conversion Card.

The easiest way to increase engagement

In a competitive digital environment, publishers must focus on enhancing engagement, interactivity, and incorporating branded content to sell more digital products. By integrating interactive content, hosting live events, offering personalized recommendations, using engaging visuals, implementing gamification, building a community, and leveraging branded content, publishers can create a more dynamic and appealing user experience.

Conversion Cards, donations and paid subscriptions can further drive revenue and build a loyal customer base. If you want a platform that is easy-to-use and want to increase your website monetization through engaging and interactive content, check out Arena’s Live Blog and Live Chat features and get ready to boost your revenue.

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Revolutionizing E-Commerce with AI: Introducing Arena’s Commerce AI

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In an increasingly noisy and competitive digital marketplace, quickly converting conversations into sales is crucial for brands and online retailers. To do this, brands must provide a superior customer experience, tailoring each interaction to the unique tastes and preferences of every customer. Arena’s Commerce AI is the answer to this challenge. It goes beyond mere engagement, driving them to make their desired purchase swiftly.

This serves both consumers and brands by accelerating the buyer’s journey for consumers and allowing brands to precisely meet individual consumer needs.

Finally, a chat-to-cart solution based on conversations

Taking user engagement to the next level, Arena’s Commerce AI delivers a personalized, concierge-like experience for every website visitor. Arena’s solution does this by marrying the power of AI with existing content on websites, files, and text and creating hyper-personalized product recommendations that take into account each user’s distinct needs and preferences.

This seamless transition from chat to cart ensures that users don’t just research products, but end up buying them.

A product expert trained by your content

Arena’s Commerce AI is an AI chat assistant that can be added to any commerce webpage. It is trained directly using website content and databases defined by the website owner, so it can have intelligent conversations with every visitor. With Commerce AI, you can help customers find exactly what they need and even suggest great recommendations to boost sales.

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Commerce AI was designed for publishers and e-commerce brands to capitalize on every customer conversation. Whether it’s increasing revenue through product recommendations or affiliate links, Arena’s new AI chat helps each individual web visitor with their own unique needs.

Check out some examples.

Commerce AI for publishers

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Digital news publishers sought to diversify their revenue streams. One relevant source of new revenue is the creation of product recommendation pages, through which publishers can leverage their credibility to monetize affiliate links.

With Commerce AI, the publisher can guide the reader in a conversational shopping experience, understanding the needs and wants and multiplying their product recommendations, increasing the chance to monetize affiliate links.

Commerce AI for e-commerce

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Online retailers can also trust Commerce AI to be their conversational guides to offering a better shopping experience. It goes beyond being just an inventory expander: Commerce AI understands and talks back to the shopper as a subject expert, giving out relevant recommendations in the context of the shopping occasion.

Commerce AI already offers Shopify and WooCommerce integrations, and fast-tracking implementation for these platforms’ retailers. Other platforms can also add Commerce AI to their online stores by adding the embed code to their HTML code.

Drive the conversation into transactions

Today, with the release of Commerce AI, Arena is not just facilitating dialogues; it is revolutionizing the way brands monetize them. The future of e-commerce isn’t just cart additions – it’s in the unique conversations leading up to them.

This innovation will empower brands to connect deeply with their audiences, establishing a level of trust that transforms casual visitors into loyal customers.

Add Commerce AI to your webstore in seconds

Try Commerce AI directly from Arena’s Dashboard. New accounts have a 14-day free trial period, and no credit card is needed.

Just follow the onboarding instructions, which will request URLs from your website so that your Commerce AI chat is trained with your content.

Then, all you have to do is personalize some of the information you’d want it to display, like greetings and a chat name, generate the embed code, and add it to your page code.

Try Commerce AI 

Request a Demo

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7 Online Community Tactics and Tools For Growth

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Building an online community is a smart way to accelerate your growth goals. Whether you’re after a larger audience to maximize advertising revenue or leads, there are several online community tactics and tools that can help you achieve success.

Use this post as a toolkit – picking the tools and tactics up as you need them.

Start With The End In Mind: KPI and ROI Goals

Community building takes resources and energy, so take the time to be strategic. Choosing the right mix of community tactics and goals is only possible when you have a clear objective. The following key performance indicators for most brands may be exactly what you need.

  • Engaged Visitors: Track the number of visitors engaged with your website, such as those who visit multiple pages. Alternatively, you might define engaged visitors by time on site or other metrics.
  • Average Time On Site: Generally speaking, higher time on site is desirable. Aim for at least 60 seconds on site as a starting goal. That’s enough time to make an initial connection with your audience.
  • First-Party Data: Gathering first-party data is vital to transforming an anonymous website visitor into an identified user. A good starting point is to track the number of people who sign up for your email list or agree to receive browser notifications.
  • Registered Community Members: Track the number of community members who have signed up by the week or the month.
  • Community Engagement Goal: The KPI mentioned above only tells you part of the story about the health of your community. It’s also vital to measure the quality of audience engagement. For example, you may also want to measure how many active members you have (i.e. members who post or comment at least once a month) or how many people attend virtual community events. Highly active community members may be good candidates to serve as ambassadors, community moderators, and other forms of community leadership in return for perks and other rewards.

We didn’t include revenue-related goals in the list because revenue is a lagging indicator of success. That means you typically can’t work on improving revenue directly. Instead, you can only influence it indirectly by getting more leads and increasing your audience.

Community Building Tactics

Review these community-building techniques with your team. For even better results, get an outside perspective on your community, like a friend who has never used your website.

1) Make Your Online Community Easy To Find On Your Website

Modern websites are complex with many moving parts. When building an online community, ensure your site architecture makes it easy to find. For example, there should be an easy-to-read navigation to the community from the homepage. In addition, you may also want to set up specific calls to action for community events like product launches, events with influencer guests, and live chat experiences.

2) Set Up Your Online Community To Welcome New People

Almost everybody has had the experience of walking into a party and struggling to make a connection. In the online context, that sense of awkwardness translates into lost engagement opportunities. The solution is to make a deliberate effort to welcome new people. The art of being welcomed in an online community has several dimensions.

Post Community Welcome Message

Post a welcome message for new people interested in joining your community. This message should give a few tips on how to get started. For example, you may have a discussion board area where new people can introduce themselves. If so, direct them to post! Also, provide clear directions on how to join the community (e.g., click here to set up your community account).

To keep this welcome message relevant and useful, set a reminder to review it monthly or quarterly and update it as needed.

Set Expectations With Community Rules

Many of the most successful and enduring online communities have community rules. Posting these rules is an essential way of making people feel safe online. Beyond preventing unwanted behaviors, community rules can signal your expectations. For example, encourage community members to post reviews or ask questions about products.

Publish Community Badges

Awarding community badges like Community Builder (e.g., engaged with 5 or more other people), Conversation Starter (e.g., starting multiple discussion threads), and Welcome (i.e., a badge to hand out to brand new users) is a proven tactic to reward ongoing

participation in your community. Community badges may be symbolic, like an icon next to a person’s name. Or you may give special recognition and privileges to your top community members (e.g., invite them to be guests in your virtual event).

Community badges are common in enterprise settings (e.g., Microsoft MVP) and more casual settings (e.g., on Discord servers for gamers and other enthusiasts).

3) Offer Premium Content Exclusively For Community Members

Posting high-quality, helpful, and entertaining content is essential to creating an engaging community. The twist here is to reserve some of your best content for registered community members. Use the following tips to position premium content for your community.

Provide Early Access To Premium Content

Reward your community members with advanced access to your content, like seeing a new video or podcast episode a day or two before everyone else. In addition to engaging your community, you will also have the opportunity to get feedback on the content before it is widely circulated.

Community Exclusive Online Events

Exclusivity is a powerful way to sell people the value of your community. Exclusive content might include “fireside chats” where a dozen community members come together with a special guest.

Question And Answer Sessions With Leaders and Employees

Active community members are likely to be among your most passionate customers. Encourage this passion further by giving them access to your leadership. For example, a clothing company might offer a Q&A session about how the company implements sustainable clothing practices.

As your community thrives and grows, informally keeping the community focused may no longer work. Bringing on a community manager or moderators can make a big difference.

4) Appoint A Community Manager

Introducing a community manager is an advanced tactic that makes sense in certain situations. Typically, an online community manager is most valuable when your community has started to achieve significant scale. You’ll know you need a community manager if you start seeing problems like falling engagement or complaints about inappropriate behavior.

The specific duties of an online community manager depend on your goals. The most common job responsibilities include the following:

  • Moderation. A community manager will review potentially inappropriate content for deletion. In some cases, the community manager may also have to determine if a specific user should be suspended or banned for inappropriate behavior or violating community rules.
  • Directing Users For Help. When your community members post asking for help or have detailed product questions, the community manager can step in and direct the person on how to access support.
  • Oversee Your Social Media Communities. Your goal may be to grow your audience on your website. However, your customers may prefer Facebook or other platforms. Therefore, the community manager reviews these other platforms and responds to community members as needed.
  • Report On Community Trends. Regularly provide written and oral reports to others in the company about current trends. In this way, the community manager helps the rest of the company understand what’s working well with the community.

What if your organization doesn’t have the budget to hire a full-time community manager? There are other options. In the previous section, you learned about community badges to recognize your top community participants. You can take that process a step further by asking your top community members to take on the role of a volunteer moderator.

Community Building Tools

Building an online community also takes the right mix of technologies. It is best to focus your community-building efforts on your website. When users are on your website, it’s easier to track their actions and gather data.

5) Use Live Chat To Build Audience Engagement.

Using Arena live chat is a powerful way to transform your website into an interactive experience. Arena has content moderation features that make it easier to keep discussions focused and enforce your standards. And the best part? It can be embedded into your existing digital properties so your community remains a part of your core brand experience, always. Learn more about Arena Live Chat.

Arena also helps brands and organizations run engaging, brand-safe community experiences with a few key capabilities.

Growing Engagement

Creating an engaging experience starts with good ideas and excellent content. However, online attention spans tend to be short. One way to keep your audience members engaged is to give them easy ways to engage. Arena has polls and Q&A features so you can ask quick questions and gather feedback at every event.

Maintaining A Brand Safe Experience

Inviting dozens, hundreds, or thousands of community members to an online event is exciting! There’s also a greater chance of some community members forgetting your ground rules. Arena’s AI content moderation is equipped to detect and block the most common profanity. Also, you can use manual moderation (e.g., review and approve each post or question) for an added level of brand safety in your most important events.

6) Use A Live Blog To Provide Updates On Breaking News

Breaking news stories offer an exciting way to build community engagement. Journalists and news organizations have used live blog technology for years to cover breaking stories. Whether you’re covering an election, tournament, criminal trial, or conference, a live blog is a speedy way to provide live updates. Learn more about Arena Live Blog.

7) Post Video Content To Lift Community Engagement

Including video in your online community is wise because Generation Z and Millennials love consuming video content. Post video shorts on social media to promote the premium content experiences on your website. Once you have users on your website, package your video experiences as events to drive engagement further.

E-commerce companies, where customers can buy through your website, have an even more significant opportunity: live shopping. Crafting a live shopping experience takes planning, so check out our guide on the best way to make live shopping successful.

How To Take Back Control of Your Community From Social Media

For years, social media has been a powerful force in building online communities. People have forged connections with new friends and developed relationships that couldn’t have happened otherwise. At the same time, social media in the 2020s faces major problems for brands seeking growth.

Over the past few years, social media platforms have faced a growing list of challenges. TikTok has faced potential government bans. Recent changes at Twitter have caused many brands to pause advertising. Facebook and Instagram have struggled with multiple scandals that have undermined their reputation. For brands dependent on social platforms, these problems all represent headwinds to growth.

The good news is that you don’t have to sit back and hope that the big social media platforms improve. You can engage your community directly on your website. Arena Community offers many of the most popular social media features like chat and social reactions.

Learn why hosting community interactions directly on your website enables growth.

How Successful B2C and B2B Brands Build Online Communities

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An online community is an important way to drive leads, engagement, and sales. While powerful, it can be challenging to design a thriving community without examples. To help you broaden your horizons and see all the possibilities around, we’ve reviewed a combined B2C and B2B online communities. These communities have been active for years and show sustained engagement.

Thriving Online Communities: 3 B2C Examples

A growing number of consumer-focused brands have created thriving communities. These efforts usually involve a combination of community building on social media and the brand’s website. There are lessons to model in each case, even if you don’t have the same product. For example, a cosmetics brand might share the audience profile as your clothing brand. Let’s examine how three different consumer companies have created digital communities hubs.

1) Glow Recipe

Founded in 2014, Glow Recipe is a skincare beauty brand. The business started by importing Korean beauty products into the United States. After a few years, the business launched its own products. By 2021, CNBC reports that the company has an “estimated $100 million in sales.”

The Glow Recipe approach to forming a digital community involves content and a rewards program.

Glow Recipe’s Content

The skincare company has a significant amount of video content and blog content to attract customers. With over 85,000 subscribers, the Glow Recipe YouTube channel includes tutorials, product videos, and media appearances. The brand’s blog is notable for its themed interview series “Boss Babes,” featuring successful women entrepreneurs and creative professionals.

Loyalty Program

The company’s content helps to attract customers, but what about inspiring repeat business? That’s where the company’s loyalty program, “Glow Rewards,” comes in. For each dollar spent with the brand, customers earn points that can be redeemed for products.

In addition, Glow Recipe’s founders had a fresh idea to bring Korean skincare products to the US market. The Glow Recipe approach is largely focused on the online world exclusively. Let’s see how Lululemon integrates digital and offline experiences to build its community.

2) Lululemon Athletica 

Based in Canada, Lululemon is best known for its yoga apparel and related products. The premium brand has attracted a significant following. The company’s focus on community building is a key driver for its success.

Events

Many stores sell athletic and leisure apparel, but few have created event experiences like Lululemon. The company’s Flatiron store in New York alone has hosted over 30 events, including fitness instruction (e.g., kettlebell basics) and offline and virtual community events with guests (e.g., the mindful creative series and book release events).

Customer Stories

Lululemon has a significant selection of inspiring customer stories called the Sweat Collection. This content includes interviews and instructional content on desk stretches and yoga routines from coaches, personal trainers, athletes and other fitness professionals. The company’s stories are brilliantly illustrated with high-quality photos and videos.

Premium Content

Ever thought about starting your own streaming service? Take inspiration from Lululemon Studio. The service includes more than 10,000 workouts. In addition, Lululemon Studio app users get a discount at Studio Partners’ locations. The paid version of the plan is currently priced at $39 per month with a twelve-month commitment

Lululemon’s success with community building shows that brands can build events, group experiences, and more around physical products.

3) Playstation

Sony’s Playstation has transformed into a thriving digital community. According to Statista, there are over 100 million monthly active users on the Playstation network as of September 2022, up from 50 million in 2014.

Designing A Shared Experience Into The Product

A key reason for Sony’s success is the shared gaming experience. By building a networked experience, players can find other people to play with worldwide. Social features and experiences are quickly becoming an everyday experience.

The Rise and Fall of The PS4 Community

While successful in many respects, Playstation offers a cautionary tale. In 2021, Sony announced it was shutting down the Playstation 4 communities. Accessible via the Playstation and a mobile app, this community feature gave players an interactive message board. ArsTechnica points out that unmoderated communities became a problem. At the same time, it’s clear that many Playstation enthusiasts are disappointed by the company’s decision.

Learn from Sony’s experience as you build brand communities. Moderation and oversight are important to maintaining the quality of community experiences. The continuing rise of online hate speech and other inappropriate content means that brand communities must remain vigilant.

Successful Online Communities: 3 B2B Examples

Building a community around a B2B audience is often considered more difficult than building a consumer community. It’s typically easy to find consumers who fit a broad profile, like men under 30 who love fitness. With B2B audiences, it can be more difficult to tap into.

1) Salesforce

Salesforce has grown into one of the most successful business software companies. The business started by tightly focused on software for sales teams. The company has recently developed products for marketing, field service, and other teams. Throughout that growth, the Salesforce focus on community has been a constant.

Salesforce Events

The Salesforce annual conference, known as Dreamforce, has become one of the largest technology conferences in the world. In 2022, the event attracted over 40,000 attendees to San Francisco. To extend the conference experience, Salesforce has made recordings of many sessions available online via Salesforce+.

The company doesn’t put all of its event eggs in the Dreamforce basket either. The business has also run a series of regional events through its Trailhead program, with gatherings planned in Phoenix, Austin, Portland, Minneapolis, and beyond in 2023. This regional approach is a smart way to reach more people unable or unwilling to travel to the Dreamforce event.

Salesforce Ecosystem of Partners and Certifications

Salesforce software is complex, with many different settings and customization options. This is a common challenge facing many business software companies. Salesforce solved this issue by leveraging its community in two ways. Rather than building up an extensive professional services division, the business has focused on developing a network of consultants. To demonstrate their expertise to clients, consultants also have the option to earn Salesforce certifications.

As of late 2022, Salesforce offers certifications for several career roles, including administrators, developers, architects, marketers, and consultants. These programs have become so popular that an industry of authors, trainers, and other experts has emerged to help people earn their certifications.

Salesforce Content Marketing

Salesforce is no stranger to content marketing either. The company currently has podcasts dedicated to marketing trends, trends in the professional world, and IT. Further, the Salesforce YouTube channel has more than 240,000 YouTube subscribers. The company’s videos include interviews, how-to content, and company news.

The Salesforce approach to content includes significant training resources for its users. The company’s Trailhead website offers in-demand videos, networking opportunities, and social media-style experiences.

The Salesforce approach to creating a highly engaged community has paid dividends. In 2022, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 people have earned Salesforce certifications. Whether you look at the company’s events or digital experiences, Salesforce has achieved tremendous engagement with its online community platforms.

2) DBT Community

Where should you go if you have a passion for analytics and engineering? The DBT Community has used several strategies to build community engagement for their technical users.

DBT Website

The centerpiece of the DBT community, which is organized around several themes: help, show and tell, and in-depth discussions. The B2B community provides immediate value by allowing users to post code and questions.

Slack

In addition to the discussion board on the DBT website, the company also offers community Slack. To keep discussions focused, the Slack has multiple channels like #leading-data-teams, #jobs (to post job postings or job hunt for people knowledgeable in dbt), and #analytics-craft.

Open Source Participation

The technology business also participates in the open source movement. The DBT-labs GitHub page has plugins, scripts, and other documentation. Choosing to offer open-source participation may not fit with every company’s goals. However, it’s wise to look for opportunities to collaborate with technical users to make your product more valuable.

3) Stripe and Indie Hackers

Stripe, a major payment software provider, has taken a different path to online community building. In 2017, Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe. The Indie Hackers brand includes a very active discussion forum, interview-style podcasts, and rich data. Cortland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, explained his decision to sell the company by discussing the burden of running the business:

“However, filling ad inventory every month has come at a cost. It was starting to occupy a large chunk of my time, and I found myself spending less and less time producing great content for the interviews, the podcast, and the forum — the very reasons I created the site in the first place.” – Acquired by Stripe.

The Stripe approach to buying an online community is significant in two ways. First, it shows that organizations don’t always have to create digital communities from scratch. Second, it shows the power of thinking more broadly about your customer base and community. Indie Hackers isn’t focused on payments – the core business of Stripe. That said, Stripe realized that online entrepreneurs need to get paid and can use Stripe to meet that goal.

Create Your Online Community Today

Whether you are selling to consumers or large businesses, an online community is a powerful strategy to generate leads, increase sales and sustain growth. These examples show different ways of using content, events, and other tactics to foster community growth. It’s also important to have the right technology for your online community. Learn more about building your digital community with Arena.

Want more live blog SEO traffic? Use this 2 part strategy

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Improving your SEO with a Live Blog is simple when you have the right process. To help users to attract more organic traffic, we’ve broken the process down into two steps. The first step is technical SEO: configuration and technical matters that make your website highly readable for users. Once that foundation is set up, the second step of the process is to focus on strategy and content. Both activities are critically important because search engine optimization needs to meet the needs of people and work with search engines.

Technical SEO Foundations For Your Live Blog

The following steps to configure your website and live blog so that Google and other search engines can easily and quickly crawl your website. Without this foundation, your website’s live blog is unlikely to be noticed, indexed, and put in front of people searching for information.

Step 1: Install Arena on your website

The way you install Arena depends on your technology. For WordPress websites, use the Arena WordPress plugin. The WordPress plugin handles the technical SEO aspects of your live blog.

For organizations that have a different backend, there are a few options:

Don’t see your CMS or backend technology covered? Contact Arena to discuss your options.

Step 2: Verify your schema is valid

For liveblogs we add the markups based on schema.org specifically for that type of content. You can read more about it here.

Use Google’s free structured data testing tool to verify that your Arena integration is working properly. If the testing tool fails, contact Arena for assistance.

Step 3: Review your website’s overall technical SEO performance.

At this point, you have set up Arena Live Blog. At the same time, your website probably has other technologies, apps, and plugins in place for performance, SEO, marketing, security, and other objectives. It’s important to review your overall website from a technical SEO perspective.

By using an SEO tool like SEMrush, you can review your website for common problems such as:

  • Website speed. Everything being equal, faster websites tend to outperform slower websites. In other words, load time has a direct impact on your organic traffic and search rankings. Make it a priority to periodically test your speed. Use 3rd party tools like Pagespeed Insights.
  • Mobile Devices. Your website’s customer experience on phones and other mobile devices should also be fast and easy to use. A poor mobile website may have a negative impact on SEO.
  • Broken Links. Identifying and fixing broken links is an important way to provide a good user experience and show that your website is well maintained by search engines. 
  • Security. Reducing your security risk by using HTTPS (Hypertext transfer protocol secure) is important. Check to make sure your website and any other key domains use it.
  • Review Keyword Optimization For Key Pages. On larger websites, you might have thousands or even millions of pages! Reviewing all of those pages in detail may not be realistic. Start by reviewing your top 10 or 20 pages by traffic to save time. At a minimum, verify that keywords in title tags are correct. Your keyword usage should also align with your overall content marketing strategy.

Step 4: Set a reminder to review your technical SEO

Achieving SEO success is a work in process. That’s why we recommend setting a reminder to review your technical SEO a year from now. For example, your content and strategy may change to emphasize international products which may require an update to your website structure. Therefore, set a reminder to review your website for technical SEO annually. If you work with SEO consultants or agencies, they may be able to help you optimize your website performance more frequently.

Creating Your Strategy And Content For Your Live Blog

The technical SEO blog set up is the foundation and frame of your home on the Internet. The next phase brings your website to life with engaging content that directly contributes to your organization’s goals. 

Step 1: What do your customers want to know?

Knowing your audience is the foundation of a successful content strategy. When a blog post or other page on your website provides answers to search queries, you’re more likely to attract customers. As customers and search engines start to view your website as a resource for relevant content, reading time will go up and it will become easier to reach your growth goals.

Take some time to review your buyer personas to remind yourself of what your audience wants from your website. For example, are your customers looking for the latest political news? Alternatively, your customers might be looking for ways to connect with other people who share their interests. Your website’s analytics will give you some answers to these questions – look at the pages and resources generating the most engagement and leads. Depending on your audience, you might have hundreds or thousands of keyword ideas at this point.

Your content should align with your business goals. Consider the specific problems you can solve for customers. This might include questions about how your product or service compares to competitors. Or advice to achieve goals. 

Step 2: What is your most successful online content?

The next strategic step to improve your live blog SEO results is to look at your website and determine what’s working right now. Open your analytics app (e.g. Google Analytics) and look at the pages that have the most traffic and are producing the most conversions. You can also study your social media analytics to come up with additional ideas.

Aim to come up with a minimum of three content ideas that have resonated with your market. We’ll build a live blog around those themes next.

Step 3: Develop a Live Blog event concept

It’s time to develop your live blog plan! Many of the most successful live blogs focus on news coverage where there is rapid change. Journalists use live blogs to cover news content like elections, high-profile cases, and conflicts. Companies can use live blogs to cover industry news, product launches, and company events.  

It’s still possible to run a live blog without a connection to a breaking news event, but it may be more difficult to get your audience engaged. Fortunately, the next step will help to pull in your audience.

Step 4: Promote your Live Blog event

You’ve come up with your live blog idea that speaks to your audience and considers your business goals. Now, it is vital to promote your live blog to your audience! For example, if your live blog relates to a company conference, make sure you mention your live blog. 

Step 5: Create your Live Blog 

At last, it’s time to start making posts to your live blog. As your team creates updates, keep a list of SEO keywords and themes on hand. Look for opportunities to weave those concepts into your live blog updates. 

Typically, a live blog will feature multiple updates per day. If your staff authors have limited capacity, consider bringing in a guest author to augment your team’s capabilities. News publishers do this all the time – they bring in special correspondents to enrich their news publishing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtcEOAxv9jY

Step 6: Measure the SEO results of your Live Blog

In the weeks following your live blog event, open your analytics. It’s time to assess the results – did you attract more visitors? Did any of those visitors convert to your email list, purchase, or take another valuable action? If the answer is yes, start planning your next live blog concept so you can pull in more traffic. If the answer is no, check again in 30 days to allow the search engines to index your live blog content.

Achieving success in SEO takes practice. If your first live blog provided limited results, go back to the fundamentals to improve. For example, did your live blog offer unique insights that couldn’t be found elsewhere? Could you support your team better to use SEO concepts like keyword sets in their updates? Lastly, review your website’s technical setup to ensure that search engines can easily coral your website.

Grow Your Organic Traffic Today With A Live Blog

Content strategy and knowing your audience takes serious work and dedication. Fortunately, Arena is here to lighten the load. You can add a live blog to your website in a matter of minutes. Learn more about our Live Blog solution. You can get the free version today to see how the live blog works. Arena Live Blog supports both live updates and pre-planned content so that your content team wouldn’t get burned out.

Go-To-Market Executive Leaders Team Announcement

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Today, Arena welcomes three executive leaders who will drive our Go To Market strategy forward. I’m pleased to welcome: Wes Matsumoto (VP of Operations), Bradon Rice (VP of Sales), and Erik “Archer” Smith (VP of Marketing). 

400% Growth Sets The Stage For Expansion

Arena has experienced 400% growth in its accounts since 2021. With over 20,000 accounts today, it’s time to shift focus. When we started the company, we focused on building a great product and finding product-market fit, and we found widespread adoption with our product-led growth motion. With our Go To Market team in place, it is time to build on this foundation and move full steam ahead to start scaling Arena.

Bradon, Wes, and Archer have excellent experience driving both sales-led and product-led growth motions, and all have backgrounds related to first-party data and navigating the cookieless world. They make a perfect team to help global companies that need support to grow engagement and build direct relationships with their customers and audience. Arena offers an unrivaled combination of engagement and rich customer data.

I’d like to share a few accomplishments and personal insights about the new leaders joining the Arena executive team. Over the next few quarters, we’ll share further updates as our teams continue to grow. 

Introducing Bradon Rice, VP of Sales

Bradon’s history of wins in technology sales makes him a fantastic candidate to grow sales at Arena.

Before joining Arena, Bradon achieved impressive success in his sales career. He has led sales organizations at Quantcast and Pendo.io. His experience working with publishers, agencies, and brands is exciting.

While at Quantcast, Bradon played a central role in driving the business to unicorn status. Also, Bradon’s success includes collaboration with peers in the services area. He was one of the first salespeople at NextRoll (formerly known as AdRoll), an AdTech startup that reached unicorn status. Bradon knows the engagement and data analytics space well. With that expertise, we’ll be positioned to serve larger companies hungry to improve engagement.

Helping brands grow in an online world dominated by a handful of social media organizations excites Bradon. As we got to know each other during the hiring process, it became clear that Bradon shares my view that Arena will help brands and media properties grow their audience in an online world dominated by walled gardens. 

With Arena on their side, content creators and publishers will have greater control over their destiny. The world will be better by empowering artists, publishers, and brands with audiences eager for their content.

Bradon lives in Marin, California, with his wife and four children. Bradon has completed several endurance races, including Olympic and half Iron Man triathlons. Outside of races and work, Bradon is often busy seeing his children play baseball, lacrosse, and soccer.

Welcoming Wes Matsumoto, VP of Operations

Maintaining high operational excellence is essential for a fast-growing company. With a strong focus on operations, I’m confident we will grow customer retention and loyalty for years. I’m delighted to welcome Wes Matsumoto to lead our operations team.

Wes’ professional background includes industry-leading infrastructure and analytics work at companies like Arm, Genesys, and Treasure Data. Wes combines deep technical expertise with a focus on improving the customer experience. Further, Wes is focused on supporting product-led growth initiatives. Wes is focused on using technology to accelerate the sales process by bringing together marketing, sales, finance, and customer success teams.

With Wes leading operations, I’m confident that Arena will deliver on today’s customer expectations. Arena customers use our product to run important events and engage their audiences. We take that responsibility seriously, which is why we are investing further to take our operations to the next level.

Born and raised in southern California, Wes has also enjoyed hiking in the great outdoors and visiting the Golden State’s beaches. Wes is passionate about designing luxury watches and watching the LA Lakers compete.

Introducing Erik “Archer” Smith, VP of Marketing

Sales and operational success won’t be enough to reach our bottom-line growth goals, though. We must also build a go-to-market strategy that positions Arena effectively at all stages of the funnel. Archer is a highly successful marketing executive who understands our market deeply and has experience building full-funnel marketing programs for our target market. He has written thought pieces on first party data, data privacy, personalization and has spent years “marketing to marketers,” which makes him an ideal fit to empathize with our current and future customers. 

Before joining Arena, Archer contributed to impressive revenue growth at Treasure Data, a leader in the Customer Data Platform space. During his tenure, the company grew from Series A to Series C over several years before being acquired. In addition, Archer has deep experience in communications technology from his time at 8×8, a noted UCaaS firm, and he also brings a breadth of startup experience, both from his time as a founder in his 20s as well as his recent work in early stage venture capital.

When I met Archer, I loved his marketing philosophy. He starts with an emotional, human-level  deep dive into customer personas so we can effectively create messaging that resonates with users, influencers and decision makers. He supports this “emotional” approach with a deep understanding of data, attribution and performance marketing which will help us all make better, data-driven decisions as we optimize our funnel at different stages of growth.

Laying The Groundwork for 2023

With Archer, Wes, and Brandon joining us at Arena, we’re ready to achieve significant results in Q4 and next year. Specifically, I’m excited to make more significant progress in the following areas.

Bradon will build the sales organization as part of a broader strategy to go upmarket. The decline and fall of third-party cookies have caused considerable uncertainty for media and brands. Arena’s platform offers a way forward to brands looking to engage and grow their audiences in the 2020s.

Archer is focused on three marketing areas for the rest of the year. First, aligning Arena’s core messaging with our market. Second, rebuilding the demand generation engine with a focus on attribution. Finally, he will build a lead and attribution forecast by channel.

Wes will help us grow faster by using his systems architecture and process optimization skills. Specifically, his priority is documenting the end-to-end process from lead to sale. Second, he will develop a technology roadmap to accelerate the lead-to-sale journal. Finally, he will collaborate with Brandon and Archer to find gaps in our conversion funnel.

While there is increased economic uncertainty, I’m confident in Arena’s growth potential for two reasons:

  1. Our new team has the background, passion, and experience to help us tackle this market.
  2. The market itself is being forced to shift to first-party data, and Arena’s solutions enable global brands to engage with their audience in a way that makes first-party data feel like a party.

In other words, the team and the time are right. So, as we like to say in Brazil: LET’S BORA!

Arena raises Series A to Create Business Engagement Platform

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What a ride it was last year! Since our launch of the Arena no-code chat messaging and data platform, more than 25,000 businesses in 150 countries have started using Arena to connect buyers with sellers, marketplaces, virtual event attendees, students with professors, social communities and streamers.

Arena.im Series A investors

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.6M Series A led by Murat Bicer and CRV, joined by Craft Ventures, to bring customer conversations and data into the hands of every consumer enterprise. Arena turns any website or app into a community to increase engagement, transaction, and actionable first-party data.

Also, we have the privilege to have incredible partners in the round: Artisanal Ventures, Vela partners, Incubate Fund and Primeset.

I couldn’t be more excited to work with our incredible investors, operators, founders and some of the world’s top minds in growth, product and marketing.

David Sacks (Founder. Yammer, Paypal, Craft)
Des Traynor (Founder. Intercom)
Olivier Pomel (Founder. Datadog)
Amit Agarwal (CPO. Datadog)
Andrew Boni (Founder. Iterable)
Jeff Samuels (COO. Iterable)
Andrew Peterson (Founder. Signal Sciences)
Elena Verna (Growth. Miro, Reforge, Netlify, SurveyMonkey)
Guillaume “G” Cabane (Growth. Segment, Drift, G2)
Andy Price (Founder. Artisanal Talent/Ventures)
Gary Benerofe (CEO. ex-mediaspa, Overdose)
Jeff Weiser (CMO. ex-Shopify, Shutterstock)
Michael Cassidy (Founder. Apollo Fusion, Xfire, GoogleX)
Babak Hamadani & Primeset (Execs. Twilio, Twitter, Box)
Romero Rodrigues (Founder. Buscape)

We’re fortunate to be adopted by incredible companies like Vans, Avon, Fox, Vimeo, Figma, Asana, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, Globo, Rogers Media, and Samsung.

Product engagement as the ultimate weapon of growth

Online brands and consumer companies keep looking for ways to move beyond social media and third-party cookies as a way of gaining more direct insights into their users and customers. Arena is leading the movement with its no-code communication platform. It uses engagement data gathered from conversations and combines that with AI to better understand who might want to buy what among our users’ customers.

We built a scalable and easy-to-install chat solution that focuses on building communities and increasing transactions such as live shopping, subscriptions, and donations. It all comes with our customer data platform that converts into first-party data and deeply understands customer behavior using AI.

We’re leading the product-led growth movement and helping companies to integrate conversation and shopping experiences into their products helping to transform the future of ecommerce, streaming, education, and online communities.

We’re in the perfect storm 

The funding comes at a key moment in the world of martech. Due to privacy and conflicts between Facebook and Apple, many companies have shifted their data sourcing activity from third-party to first-party data. With the end of the cookie era, brands and consumer enterprises will focus on building social products and gathering their own customer data rather than relying on the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons of this world to provide the information.

How we became successful: No-code and PLG approach

Arena is an entirely product-led growth company for our first 24,000 customers; spending $0 on marketing and only growing from the viral nature of network effects. By all measures, we are the fastest growing chat messaging for consumer enterprises – and can attribute most of this to the product and its virality component.

I really believe that product engagement is the ultimate weapon to grow. Now we’re helping every website to build conversations and understand their customers with just one line of code.

It takes only 2 minutes to deploy Arena to any website or mobile app, and it’s a fraction of the price offered by Twilio, Segment or Adobe. It comes with a chat messaging platform integrated with a robust CDP, all-in-one.

Because of the nature of the product and the problem that we’re solving, Arena is perfect for SMBs, mid-market and large enterprises. Our annual contracts vary from $2K to 400K ACV, both producing the same value proposition:

  • 64% increase on engagement
  • 5x more first party data
  • 18% boost on conversion and transactions

Our customers absolute love our product, with a 76 NPS.

Arena is building a market leading Customer Engagement Platform

We believed that creating a social and highly engaging product would empower communities and enable transactions such as e-commerce, subscriptions, and donations/gifts. 

Ultimately, it would translate into customer data as Arena deploys AI to understand behavior and build intent-based experiences at scale.

Get started with Arena

We couldn’t do this without our amazing team or our customers. Our mission at Arena is clear: we want to be the conversation platform of the web.

Arena is free to get started with and doesn’t require a credit card! Check out the product at arena.im.

Come work with us

Arena is hiring across the board for Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Product! More information can be found on our careers page.