Get More Customers With A Retarget Customer Data Platform

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A customer data platform needs the right fuel to achieve growth—data from sales systems, customer loyalty data, insights from programmatic advertising, and advanced analytics all help. Ultimately, the way to lift conversion rates requires significant first-party data. 

Why First Party Data Should Be The Core Of Your Marketing Strategy

If you ask most marketing teams, they’ll say they are drowning in data from analytics tools. The burden gets even more significant when you factor in customer insights from third-party data. That’s why your customer data platforms need to emphasize direct interactions with customers (i.e., first-party data).

To make the most out of your marketing activities and get better retargeting results, you need the proper foundation in place first. With the right marketing technology, it is far easier to focus your advertising campaigns to achieve better click-through rates and increase conversion rates.

Gathering Your First-Party Data For Retargeting

Fulfilling your business strategy is easier when you can make Facebook ads, email marketing, and overall digital marketing deliver more results. Effectively gathering first-party data into a centralized database makes it easier to provide personalized experiences.

To build accurate customer profiles, look at the data you already have, like purchase history, insights from your legacy systems, and other data points available in your marketing automation platform. These data points are vital to building a company’s first-party data foundation. However, there is much more high-quality customer data you can gather.

4 Marketing Opportunities To Gather And Use First Party Data 

Online events and community experiences give you an unusual way to transform anonymous visitors into potential customers. To achieve this feat, your tech stack needs to be equipped with marketing automation tools like Arena Personas and live chat. Once your email systems and preferred marketing solution are ready, it’s time to engage your target audiences. 

1) Offer Online Experiences To Potential Customers

Using marketing campaigns to gather today from various customer segments is easier when there is a value exchange. Every single customer should get something out of interacting with your company like a community experience, pricing (e.g. discounts), early access to products or useful insights.

For example, you can use Arena live chat to deepen your customer relationships by running engaging online events. As you add more engaging experiences, customer acquisition cost may go up for a period of time. In the long term, providing customers live event experiences can raise customer retention.

Instead of attempting to understand the desires of anonymous segments, tracking user engagement in different types of online activity (e.g. chat and website use) leads to more actionable insights. Let’s break down how gathering first-party data with an online experience can help.

E-Commerce Business Use Case

For example, B2C customers may react with excitement in a chat session during a livestream event. To see how this information could be used, consider e-commerce brands. They may be considering launching 10 products over the next quarter but  can use this insight to improve the results of product launches. By observing the chat and related behavior patterns like website clicks, you can estimate demand for products (e.g. “Hey, we noticed over a hundred people wanted the new blue shirt!”). 

With this insight in mind, there are at least two ways you can get more business. First, you can run a targeted campaign to your current customers and reference your chat experience (e.g. “We saw that many of you are excited about our new linen blue shirts! Order by Friday and you’ll get 10% off!”). Second, you can then make changes on your advertising platform to emphasize the new shirt. 

2) Create Campaigns For Your Current Customers 

Marketing campaigns often focus on bringing in net new customers and prospects. In addition to that objective, it’s important to engage your current customers. In many respects, it’s easier to  execute data-driven personalization is to focus on customers. Unlike anonymous website visitors, customers have signaled what they value with their buying behavior including offline purchases. Let’s illustrate this use case for enterprise-level companies in the software industry. 

B2B Enterprise Use Case

Selling complex business software often feels like a Herculean task. Achieving business success often requires a full team of sales professionals like account executives, sales development representatives and others. Further, the marketing team is constantly working hard to collect customer stories, optimizing online advertising campaigns and more.

In this context, it’s vital to make the most of your customer base. For example, you might have a significant percentage of customers on a mid tier plan while your goal is to emphasize the top tier enterprise plan. In that case, you might offer online experiences showcasing the success of users in the top tier plan and encourage them to share their success stories. For instance, enterprises users might rave about the analytics capabilities and native integrations available in your top tier plan. Running a live event where customers have the opportunity to share their experiences with each other is powerful!

There are some downsides to this type of campaign. It requires significant insight into customer behavior. It’s vital to know your customer satisfaction levels so that you shine a spotlight on your most delighted customers. This type of campaign also requires significant collaboration between sales and marketing. Fortunately, solutions like Arena Personas make such marketing efforts easier to arrange. 

3) Get Better Lookalike Audiences

In Facebook advertising, it has been a common practice to create a lookalike audience by uploading your customer list. Facebook then uses its customer match capabilities to find more people who are similar to your current customers. This approach to Facebook advertising isn’t your only option. What if your target audience isn’t on Facebook or Facebook campaigns aren’t producing satisfactory results? The first party data you gather can help you to market more effectively.

The downside to relying entirely on an advertising platform for lookalike audiences is that you are dependent on their database. If some or many of your customers are not active users on Facebook, retargeting via the Facebook pixel may not work well.

The alternative is to build your own lookalike audiences. With a large enough audience, you may be able to pursue granular segmentation in a custom audience as shown in the following example.

Individual Audience Factors

Every purchase is ultimately made by an individual, whether they are buying as a consumer or at a company. Therefore, it is usually wise to start with these factors.

  • Age: understanding the typical age profile of your ideal audience helps you to decide which channels, creative and offers to use.
  • Gender: it is helpful to know if gender differences are relevant to your market.
  • Geography: contrast the geography of your website visitors to your ideal customer profile.
  • Interests: find out the topics, publications and media your audience likes. If you offer online event experiences like virtual conferences, look at registration records to see 

B2B Audience Factors

If you are focused on appealing to B2B audiences, the following customer attributes are important. 

  • Industry: to minimize confusion, use a standard industry classification like the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
  • Company Size: use number of employees or revenue as a filter. 
  • Technology Stack: If you offer technology products or services, knowing the customer’s tech stack is helpful. For example, does it matter if the customer uses Salesforce?

Is Your Audience Segment Too Large?

Audience segmentation can become less useful when the audience becomes too large. IF you end up with an audience segment with millions of individual customers, it may need to be narrowed down. Leverage feedback from the sales team and customer service to narrow the list. They may be able to help you identify the customer attributes associated with the most valuable customers (e.g. people who tend to move through the customer journey quickly).

4) Lapsed Customer Engagement

When a customer cancels their account or stops buying for a long period of time, all hope is not lost. In many cases, you have a good chance to reengaging lapsed customers with a retargeting campaign. To build this type of audience segment, it’s important to choose who to include and who to exclude.

Start by defining a lapsed customer. For simplicity, let’s define a lapsed customer as a prior customer whose last purchase was six to twelve months ago. Once you have that list, it’s vital to filter it further using your customer relationship management data. Specifically, you want to exclude customers who complained or experienced significant problems. Reengaging such former customers is much more challenging and may require more guidance from the sales team.

Now that you have your audience segment prepared, prepare a custom advertising campaign. B2C companies often find that a simple “we’ve missed you!” style message with an incentive (e.g. 10% off coupon) is an effective way to bring back customers. For B2B campaigns, communicating new features or capabilities can help. Even better, reengage lapsed customers by inviting them to an online event.

The Final Ingredient To Successful Retargeting: Leverage Market Awareness

Once you choose one of the ideas from above to execute, there is one more critical point to consider: market awareness. The three part market funnel – top of funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel – gives us a good framework. Let’s pair the market funnel concept with the audience segmentation we covered earlier.

1) Top of Funnel

In the top of the marketing funnel, most prospects have little to no understanding of your product and how it might help them. This is the marketing equivalent of cold calling. The advantage of top funnel marketing is that you have the greatest opportunity because this segment is always the biggest. The disadvantage is that you usually need to be more patient.

With a top of funnel focus, leveraging the “Offer Online Experiences To Potential Customers” strategy makes sense. In this case, your primary marketing campaign would focus on inviting prospects to an online event. After the event, you would follow up with retargeting campaigns to offer an event recording or other assets to give people a reason to opt in to your marketing.

If you use events, use our how to promote your virtual event guide to get more attendees.

2) Middle of Funnel

Also known as the evaluation stage, the middle of the funnel is an intermediate step in the customer journey. In this stage, the potential customer has some awareness of what you offer. It’s now up to you to nurture the prospect further. In contrast to top of funnel, you likely already have some prospect or customer data in place so you can start off with a retargeting campaign.

Consider adapting the “Create Campaigns For Your Current Customers” concept to middle of the funnel campaigns. Highlighting your current customers via an event, case study or interview is a powerful way to prove your credibility. Using your customer data platform, identify prospects who have interacted with your brand in the past 3 months (e.g. attended a webinar, participated in a live chat etc). Once you have identified this audience segment, create a marketing campaign to emphasize your case studies.

3) Bottom of Funnel

Converting leads at the bottom of the marketing funnel depends on your business model. If customers make an online purchase, a campaign offering a deadline and incentive is often a good bet. For B2B or enterprise sales, running marketing campaigns may not be your best best. Instead, it may be more effective to collaborate with the sales team to find out what type of campaigns they want. For example, highly customized and targeted direct mail campaigns may be the best way forward.

Use Arena Personas To Get More of The Right Data

Data driven personalization campaigns and advanced audience segmentation all depend on having high quality data. To help companies get more of the data they need to grow, use Arena Personas. It’s the fastest way to collect and import first-party data into your customer data platform. Then you’ll find it far easier to run retargeting campaigns across the marketing funnel.

How To Manage Live Chat Experiences

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Live experiences are a powerful way to connect more deeply with your community. With Arena, it’s easy to create new digital experiences quickly. Like any good story, there is a beginning, middle, and end to managing a live experience. We’ll guide you through each step, but first, there is an important question we need to answer.

Why Offer Live Experiences At All?

Creating an engaging live experience for your audience takes effort and resources. You might have experience running the occasional event or traditional digital marketing campaigns. There are a few reasons why offering live experiences to your audience is valuable.

1) Get Faster, Better Feedback From Your Audience

Without consistent feedback from your audience, it’s difficult to know if your marketing and experiences are working. Sure, tracking traditional metrics like conversions and engagement levels is helpful. It’s even better to get live feedback! 

Just imagine if you could show a product mockup to customers during a virtual event – that would give you far richer feedback than measuring the number of clicks on a page.

2) Thrive In The Post-Cookie Online World

Digital marketers and audience builders can’t rely on traditional cookies to understand audience behavior and interests. The solution, in brief, is to build a direct relationship with your audience (i.e., first-party data). For more insight on this change, see our post: The Future of Cookies In Marketing Strategy.

When your brand offers appealing social events using live chat, it becomes far easier to gather first-party data. That rich data is the foundation of success in the 2020s and beyond.

3) Deepen Audience Relationships

The final reason why offering live experiences matters comes down to relationships. Think back to the last conference you attended, like SaaStr Annual. You probably met lots of people, discovered new insights, and felt positive about the event. You can capture some of that event magic with engaging online experiences. By regularly running engaging live events, your audience will start to see your online presence as a community rather than simply a website.

Now that you see why it’s vital to provide live experiences to your audience, let’s start the planning process.

The Beginning Of Your Live Experience: Set Up Your Chat In Arena

Now you are ready to build your live chat experience in Arena. Use the following steps to set up and customize your live chat experience.

Step 1: Log in to your Arena account

Step 2: Click on Live Chat in the Arena dashboard.

Step 3: Click create a new chatroom.

Step 4: Name your chat (e.g., “Annual Launch Event”)

The chat name you select is for internal use only – chat participants will not be able to see this name.

Step 5: Select your chat status

There are two options: live and closed. The live option launches your chat session immediately and makes it available to everyone. On the other hand, if you want to be the only one who can post messages, choose closed.

Assuming you are planning a live experience for a future time, the closed status option is best. That means you can further customize the settings to your liking before making the live chat available to your audience.

Step 6: Choose your live chat settings

Arena gives you various ways to manage the experience depending on your needs. The list below includes some of the most significant options to keep in mind:

  • Language: choose the language your participants want to use.
  • Keep Chat Open: turn this option to make sure your chat is seen by the user.
  • Send direct messages: enabling this feature lets users send private messages to each other. It can be a helpful way to foster networking.
  • Pre-moderation: using this feature means that your team must approve messages before they approve. While it places more of a burden on your team, pre-moderation is a powerful way to support brand safety.
  • Sign-Up Options: you can choose Not Required (i.e., anybody can join), Sign Up Required (i.e., adds a minor speed bump to participation), or Single Sign On. The sign up option lets users enter an email address or use another credential (i.e. Facebook, Twitter or Google). 
  • Allow Slow Mode. In a live experience, you might have hundreds of participants and it’s easy to become overwhelmed when many people start posting messages. The slow mode lets you impose a delay between how often people can post messages (e.g. 10 seconds between messages). This mode is a helpful way to discourage harmful and distracting chat activity. If you use this mode, take a moment to explain it to your users at the start of the session. 
  • Allow Sharing Links: Choose whether you want to let participants share links. If you take other measures like requiring a sign-up or pre-moderation, allowing links is less risky. 
  • Profanity Filter: we recommend turning this feature on to maximize brand safety and avoid upsetting participants.

Navigating all of these options might take a few minutes the first time you use it. By the second or third time, you’ll a feel for which options are best suited to your audience. 

Once you have completed all of the settings to your liking, click the Create button at the bottom of the screen.

Step 7: Choose your Embed option

The embed option controls how Arena Live Chat appears on your website. There are a few options here: In-Page, Bottom, Side and Overlay. If you’re not sure which option to choose, we recommend overlay. 

When ready, click the “Copy” button at the bottom of this screen. This will generate a short piece of code for your website. To launch the live chat, this code needs to be added to your website. The specific steps vary depending on the type of website you have. For additional support, see our help guide: Adding Arena to your site.  

Step 8: Refresh your website and look for the live chat!

If you selected the live option in step 4, your live chat window will appear right away!

By the way, don’t worry about getting everything perfect the first time – you can go back and make updates whenever you want.

How To Run A Live Experience Like A Pro 

In our three-part story concept, running the live experience is the critical “middle” part of the story. Use the following tips to ensure your live chat experience runs smoothly.

Get Your Two Person Team Ready

It is usually wise to have at least two people involved in your live chat experience: an event host and a support person. The event host will focus on the conversation while the support person can address technical issues.

Have Your Scripts and Notes Available

When you run a live experience, you’re effectively on stage! It’s perfectly normal to have a bit of stage fright at first. One of the best ways to reduce anxiety is to prepare notes in advance and have them ready. Use our X resource to prepare your live experience script.

Join The Live Chat Early

Let’s say that your live event will run from 4 pm to 5 pm. It’s best to let people enter the virtual chat room at least 5 minutes before the event starts. Your staff should join early as well. Joining early means you can address technical questions quickly.

Explain Your Ground Rules

While optional, we recommend taking a minute or two to explain your ground rules for the live experience. This is especially important if you are using features like pre-moderation or profanity filters. Taking a moment to explain that you are offering a safe experience and that you will not tolerate abusive behavior will help to discourage disruptions.

Stick The Landing: Tips To End Your Live Experience Effectively

As your live chat experience comes to a close, schedule some time with your event team to explore the event. This is a critical continuous improvement discipline that ensures your live experiences will keep getting better over time. Use the following tips to run your post-live experience session with your team.

Recognize Successes

Kick off your post-chat review by celebrating what went well. For example, did you achieve a new milestone like 100 or 500 chat participants? Take a moment to praise your team for these developments.

What Worked Well?

Continuing on the positive theme, make a list of the practices that went well. For example, you might add three support people to keep a large event on track. Record these best practices and make sure you keep using them.

Gather “Stop Doing” Suggestions

Now, ask your team what you should stop doing or change for the future. To avoid blame and finger-pointing, emphasize changes that can be made for the future. 

Review The Live Chat Log

Finally, review the live chat log. In particular, look at questions directed to your company. If there are repeated questions like “why aren’t all of my questions appearing?” you may need to better explain your moderation practices.

Start Your Live Chat Experience This Week

Offering a live chat experience takes creativity and a team effort. Fortunately, the Arena Live Chat solution is simple and fast to install. On average, users take less than 15 minutes to install Arena on their website. Learn more about Arena Live Chat!

How To Use Chat Polls and Q&A To Grow Engagement

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Using chat polls and Q&A in an online chat are some of the best ways to boost engagement. Despite this fact, there’s a good chance that you’re not yet fully utilizing these tools. Overlooking these engagement tactics is To understand why let’s look at why engagement is so critical.

Why Chat Polls and Q&A Capabilities Are Critical 

In the past, digital marketers and publishers tend to focus on metrics like pageviews and cost per click. While helpful, those metrics scratch the surface. Focusing too much on these numbers can lead us away from more important goals like building an audience of fans eager to hear you.

Your entire marketing strategy will benefit from developing an engaged audience on your website. The pressure to convert cold traffic will ease. You will have a growing group of people who look forward to your website. Your audience will spread the word as you become more skilled in virtual event ideas. When your audience views your website as a place to engage socially, lead generation and higher advertising revenue.

The benefits of growing an engaged, loyal audience on your website are clear. With that in mind, it’s time to explore specific tactics to lift engagement further.

Audience Engagement Tactic 1: Chat Polls

Let me tell you a story about a webinar to understand why chat polls are helpful. Years ago, I was presenting a series of webinars to a group of professionals interested in project management. As I planned the presentation, I made assumptions about the audience’s interests. Yet, I wasn’t entirely sure about those guesses, so I used two quick audience polls in the first five minutes of the webinar. The result was a far better presentation for two reasons. First, I could better tailor the event to attendees’ level of knowledge. Second, the poll questions sparked a brief discussion in the chat app. 

Afterward, I made it a rule to constantly check for opportunities to use poll questions. It usually takes a few minutes of preparation to create good poll questions to lift engagement significantly.

How To Use Chat Polls To Grow Your Audience

Arena makes it simple to use polls to spark engagement with your audience. Use the following steps to create your chat polls.

Step 1: Log in to your Arena account

Step 2: Set up your Live Chat (optional)

You can skip this step if you have already created a live chat.

Step 3: Click on the Polls tab at the top.

Step 4: Write your poll questions and answers

Polls are typically structured as multiple choice questions. For example, you might ask online event attendees how many online conferences they have attended. In that case, the poll answers might be 0, 1, or more than 2.

As a rule of thumb, keep your poll question simple (i.e., a single sentence). The poll answers should also be simple with a maximum of 5 options, but you can add options if you wish. When polls get complicated, your audience may not want to make an effort to figure them out.

Step 5: Choose your schedule

The schedule option determines how long your poll is visible to participants. In shorter events like a one-hour presentation, we recommend keeping polls visible for 15 minutes. In more extended events like 1 or 2 day virtual or hybrid conferences, you might decide to leave polls open for longer (e.g., let participants see the poll and respond when the event takes a lunch break)

Step 6: Decide whether to show the number of votes.

This optional feature can help lift engagement further. The downside is that attendee responses might be influenced by seeing which answer is the most popular. Usually, that bias is not a problem.

Step 7: Save the poll as a draft or post it

After setting up your poll, you have two options: post or save it as a draft. Both of these options can be useful in different situations.

Post: When you click post, the poll immediately becomes available in the live chat session. If you just had an excellent idea for a poll during an event, use the post option to get that poll in front of your audience immediately.

Save as Draft: If your live chat event is in the future and you are simply getting everything ready, use the save as draft option. Your saved poll will be waiting for you whenever you decide to launch it. You can publish, edit or delete a saved poll at any time, so don’t worry about getting everything perfect.

Three Ideas To Use Chat Polls 

Now you know how to create, save and publish polls in Arena. That leaves just one question: what kind of polls should you create? The answer ultimately depends on the needs of your audience, your goals (e.g., a focus on lead generation vs. a different goal), and your business model. Use the following prompts to brainstorm additional ideas with your team.

1) Gather Audience Demographics

Thanks to your customer data platform, you may already have a good understanding of the demographics of your customer base. However, the specific individuals who show up to any given online event may be different. You may want to ask a few quick poll questions to understand your audience better. 

For example:

  • Customer Vs. Potential Customer: Create a poll to ask attendees if they have ever bought one of your products
  • Geography: Online events are potentially open to a global audience. Consider setting up a quick poll to see where attendees are located. This question is crucial because it can help you understand if your online events are reaching your audience at an appropriate time of day.

2) Check Interest In Future Events

Building an engaged online community takes effort over time. Market research will only take you far in developing winning events and chat experiences. Use a live chat poll to determine which event ideas to prioritize.

For example:

A college or university might ask the following poll question to deepen engagement with potential students.

Question: Which of the following event ideas are most interesting to you:

  • A) Meet successful alums from the college
  • B) Discover your financial aid options to pay for college
  • C) Take a virtual tour of the campus

3) Make Fast “In Flight” Changes

Maintaining engagement with your audience takes ongoing effort. You might sense that your audience is losing interest part of the way through your event. Setting up and running a quick poll can help to get your event back on track.

For example:

A company has set up a virtual conference to support the sales team. Fifteen minutes into the event, you notice that the live chat is starting to go quiet. Putting a poll question might help to reignite your audience’s engagement.

Question: What sales goals are you most excited about this year?

  • A) Getting promoted!
  • B) Getting into President’s Club
  • C) Closing my largest deal ever

Keep these live chat poll ideas in mind as you plan your next live chat event.

Audience Engagement Tactic 2: Question And Answer (Q&A) Experiences

Question and answer (Q&As) sessions are proven to connect with audiences. They have been used for years in traditional events. Executives, authors, lecturers, and others use Q&A time to connect. Find out how to use Arena’s Q&A capability to deepen connections with your audience.

How To Use Q&A To Boost Online Audience Engagement

Use this step-by-step guide to add a Q&A to your Arena Live Chat experience. The whole process just takes a few minutes.

1) Log in to your Arena account

2) In the Arena dashboard, click Live Chat and then choose the Live Chat you want to add a Q&A to

3) Click on the Q&A tab at the top of the screen

4) Click the “Enable Q&A” button

5) Turn on “pre-moderation” for Q&A (optional)

The pre-moderation feature means you get to control which of the submitted questions appear in the live chat. This optional feature is helpful in larger live chat experiences when you are hosting a VIP guest (e.g., the company CEO) or simply want to provide a curated experience for your attendees. 

To use Q&A moderation effectively, we recommend assigning this responsibility to a dedicated person. Let your main speaker or event MC stay focused on engaging the audience.

Four Ideas To Use Q&A In Live Chat

With the above steps, you’ve just learned how to add Q&A capabilities to your live chat. Like any tool, it’s helpful to know when and how to use this capability for the best results. Use the following prompts to devise thoughtful ways to use Q&A with your team.

1) Encourage Effective Audience Participation

When you host a live chat experience, you welcome an audience into your digital space. As the host, it’s up to you to set the ground rules. Setting those expectations includes guiding your audience on how to ask questions in a chat session effectively. For example, your audience might post dozens of questions, and you may only have time to answer a handful of questions. When your audience sees which questions get answered, they’ll engage even more effectively next time.

2) Leverage Moderated Q&A For A Safer Experience

In recent years, phishing, scams, bullying, and other harmful behaviors have become more common in the digital world. Despite those facts, there are practical steps you can take to make YOUR live chat safer for attendees. Specifically, turn on the Q&A moderation feature when it is vital to offer a safer experience, such as a live chat session with families. 

There’s another aspect to offering a safe experience – just think of hosting a virtual event with an important guest. For example, your CEO might join an event celebrating a significant company milestone like funding or launching a new product. In this setting, it’s essential to make your leaders look good! Use your judgment to decide which questions are approved. After the event ends, ask your guest if they want to see all of the questions to review privately.

3) Keep Large Live Chat Experiences Organized

Running a large-scale live chat experience is quite challenging. When you have hundreds or thousands of participants, simply keeping up with all the messages posted in the chat window can feel overwhelming. Using the Q&A capability is critically important in an event with many participants. The Q&A lets you separate questions from the general chat discussions. That means you can host a more focused Q&A session.

4) Review Q&A Content For Sales, Marketing, and Support

The first few benefits of running a Q&A in your live chat focus on immediate benefits. This benefit is focused on the long term. Arena’s event log history feature automatically captures all chat transcripts – including Q&As – so you can easily export the questions to review them later. 

The next day, invite a few sales, marketing, and customer support colleagues to review the questions with you. Some of the questions might be helpful to the sales team (e.g., “Is the product compatible with ABC technology?”). Other questions may help the marketing team craft an even better event in the future (e.g., several people suggested several social media influencers as guests for future online events). Still, other questions may indicate that potential customers are unclear about your shipping or return policies. Remember – just because a product feature or company policy seems obvious to your employees, it might feel confusing to your customers. Take the time to come up with detailed answers to these questions, and your next online event will be even more successful. 

Enhance Your Live Chat With Polls and Q&A Today

Adding live chat to your website makes your website more engaging. Unlocking the next level of audience engagement requires more engagement techniques. Arena Live Chat gives tools like polls, Q&A, and profanity filters to protect your brand. Learn more about Live Chat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ShIt6QuZ8

Discover how Arena Live Chat directly increases website revenue.

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What if you could bring new revenue to your business by engaging your audience more deeply? With Arena Live Chat, there are advertising and non-advertising methods to get more revenue from your website with Live Chat. Depending on your business model, you can use both methods to add new revenue streams to your company.

The Two Ways To Unlock New Revenue Streams Today 

There are two primary business models to earn revenue from an online property today: selling access to your audience to advertisers and using the audience to directly sell your products. 

Advertising Revenue Generation

The direct method is to sell advertising – a popular strategy used by major media brands, bloggers, and many others. There are multiple ways to generate advertising revenues. You can earn a fee for displaying ads (i.e., display advertising). Alternatively, you may earn a fee for recommending products (i.e., affiliate marketing). Some businesses generate revenue by creating sponsored content like reviews. These revenue streams require a creative approach, relevant advertising, and an engaged audience. Live chat can help you develop and grow your audience.

A key advantage of advertising revenue is that you do not need to create, manage or offer products or services of your own. Instead, you simply use an advertising platform (or make direct deals with advertisers) and start generating revenue! However, advertising revenue generation has its limitations. Advertising revenue tends to fluctuate throughout the year – the fall is often more active than the summer. In addition, your content and audience need to meet the needs of advertisers. If advertisers don’t like your website, they can go elsewhere.

Non-Advertising Revenue Generation

The other way to unlock revenue streams with live chat is to sell your products and services. The specific model you use will depend on how your business works. For example, an enterprise software company will likely be focused on lead generation for the sales team. On the other hand, a website with an online store may leverage live chat to sell its products directly.

Generating revenue directly from your audience is different from advertising. Generally speaking, you can earn much more revenue by selling your products. The downside is that you must invest in a sales and marketing process. For example, your audience may not be interested in buying an expensive product when they first hear about it. Instead, your sales team will probably need to reach out and engage leads. If you sell lower-priced products, following up with email marketing may be all you need.

The Core Ingredient Every Online Business Requires

An engaged and growing audience is the fuel that powers every online business. Without an audience interested in your content and online experiences, your growth possibilities become constrained. Without an audience, you will unlikely be able to generate meaningful advertising revenue. After all, why should an advertiser pay you if they don’t get access to a large audience?

A non-advertising business model can still operate without an audience. Yet, growth becomes far more complex. In essence, you will need to rely on other methods like an outbound sales program, advertising, and events. While all these methods work, they are more challenging to scale. In contrast, global brands like IBM, Accenture, and Goldman Sachs invest in building an engaged online audience. 

Whether your goal is to generate advertising revenue or sell your products, an engaged and growing audience is vital. Adding Arena Live Chat to your website is one of the best ways to nurture an engaged audience.

How Live Chat Chat Helps You To Grow Revenue

Using a live chat session to generate additional revenue (i.e., live chat monetization) is easy when you use the right tools. Arena Live Chat is a no-code tool you can install on most websites in a matter of minutes. You can use two approaches to live chat monetization: directly using Arena Live Chat monetization features or using live chat to grow an audience and monetize them differently.

Arena Live Chat helps you to grow audience engagement with a few key features:

  • Q&A: Hosting your CEO or a VIP at your live chat? Use the Q&A feature to gather questions and then ask your guest to answer the most significant questions. 
  • Direct messages: Your audience may not want to share everything directly in a public chat room – that’s why we offer direct messages so individuals can send messages to each other.
  • Reactions: Inspired by social media, reactions are a way for other users to express themselves without having to type.
  • GIFs. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It might be worth even more when you have the right GIF. Arena Live Chat has access to a library of GIFs. 
  • Channels. A chat experience can become disorganized if there are many unrelated discussions happening in the same place. By creating separate channels, your audience can easily find people who share the same interests.

Live Chat Monetization With Arena: 3 Features To Generate Immediate Revenue

Arena Live Chat. Today, Arena Live Chat offers three different monetization capabilities: Donation, Gifts, and Tip Jar. There are a few different ways to use these options, so let’s take a closer look at how to use these features.

Donation

With a donation, a user directly gives money to you. Before accepting donations, it’s essential to set clear expectations with your audience. Some people, they associate the word donation with a charitable organization. If you are running a fundraising event for a nonprofit, using the donation monetization option makes sense. For-profit companies should generally avoid using the donation feature because it may confuse their audience.

Gift and Tip Jar

Both of these live chat monetization features are useful in a few circumstances. For example, an ecommerce business might invite an influencer to a product launch event. The primary focus of the virtual event is to promote the product being launched. That said, you may want to give your audience the chance to send a gift or tip to the influencer participating in the event. Also, the gift and tip car monetization features are relevant if you are hosting a concert. As with the donation option, requesting tips may not be appropriate for companies to use.

How Does Arena Process The Revenue? 

Let’s say you generate significant revenue from your live chat session. Your finance team will want to know if these funds will be tracked and managed. Arena makes this process easy through the payment integrations available through the Enterprise plan. Other Arena users can use PayPal to receive revenue. 

Don’t use PayPal? Don’t worry – Arena is also working on developing an integration with Stripe. Stay tuned for more news on that front!

After you receive funds, take some time to analyze the results. For example, are there any users who sent unusually large amounts? If so, it’s wise to reach out to thank them. This extra effort goes a long way to keep the most passionate members of your audience engaged.

Live Chat Monetization: Optimizing For Conversions

The most powerful way for a company to leverage live chat monetization is to view it as a marketing platform. Start by using live chat as a way to build awareness and trust with your audience. By hosting a series of live chat events over time, your audience will become more familiar with your brand. As a result, they will be more likely to positively respond to marketing messages such as an invitation to join your email list, buy a product or meet with your sales team.

Many Arena users use live chat experiences as a way to generate conversions. For example, you can use Arena conversion cards to focus your audience on a conversion goal. Conversion cards can be used for several objectives like getting a prospect to sign up for your list, following you on social media, visiting a landing page or making a purchase.

Today, there are a few popular you can leverage Arena conversion cards in Live Chat and Live Blog to grow your business.

  • Lead Generation: Capture emails, Ebook download, Visit a webpage (e.g. a landing page)
  • Sales: Sell a product, sell a subscription to streaming services

Of course, you’re not limited to these options. Want to invite people to sign up for a paid, exclusive live chat experience? You can do that! Want to grow your following on TikTok instead? You can use conversion cards to advance that goal. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaCyOtk3838

For the best results, it is smart to augment your conversion cards in the event itself. Let’s say you are running a virtual conference event with Arena Live Chat. Ask your presenters to verbally reinforce the call to action mentioned on the conversion card (e.g. “And now, please click the link in the live chat to get updates about our next virtual event!”). This approach is especially effective if your audience is new to use Arena Live Chat and conversion cards.

As you start to become more familiar with running live chat experiences, you’ll gradually collect more and more data on your customers. Use the Arena customer data platform to put your customer data to good use. Without a CDP in place, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your live chat monetization opportunity. 

Get More Revenue From Your Website With Live Chat Today

You’ve discovered all of the ways that a live chat app can help you monetize your website audience. A more engaged audience means more pageviews and time on site which directly impacts potential advertising revenue. That’s not all. When your audience engages with you and others in a live chat, they are more likely to like and trust your brand. When you add live chat to your website, you’ll start to find that lead generation and sales become much easier. Learn more about Live Chat here.

5 Essential Tips for Online Community Safety

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The online world has a problem: harmful content and interactions are growing. At its worst, harmful content and communications are used to incite physical violence, but receiving negative comments online can also be extremely damaging to one’s mental health, sense of self-worth, and overall safety.

That is why, when brands build online communities of their own, guaranteeing your online community safety should be a top priority.

The High Cost Of Harmful Online Content

Harmful online content has countless other impacts. As mentioned above, mental health can suffer when people are exposed to negative content and, in the majority of the cases, this harmful content is targeted at women and minorities. For example, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all struggle with harmful content despite their significant efforts to counter these trends. Let’s look at a few statistics that illustrate the depth of this challenge.

Social Media Platforms Spend Billions On Content Moderation

In 2021, CNBC reported that Facebook alone is spending billions of dollars on content moderation efforts. Those costs will likely increase because moderators complain about mental health problems and inadequate pay.

The $78 Billion Impact of Fake News

A 2019 report from CHEQ estimated the financial cost of fake news at $78 billion. The report defines fake news as “The deliberate creation and sharing of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either for the purposes of causing harm or for political, personal or financial gain.” Such efforts are hurting democratic governance, eroding trust, and making it more difficult to create positive online communities.

Increasing Government Attention

In the early days, the growth of the Internet was supported by minimal regulation. The impact of harmful online content and increasing concerns about privacy protection are already changing the online landscape. Marketers have already had to adapt their practices in light of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

New proposals from the British and Canadian governments further demand regulation of harmful online content. So far, these efforts to target and reduce harmful online content are targeted at a small number of large technology companies. Eventually, those expectations may apply to other businesses like yours.

It’s clear that harmful content is a significant problem. While the problem may be at its worst on large, publicly available social media sites, it is still a concern for other businesses. For example, your company may offer virtual events and virtual conferences to engage your audience, and such events are typically intended to be many people. Therefore, you risk harmful or damaging content undermining your online community safety efforts.

That’s the bad news…. The good news is that the situation is far from hopeless. There are specific steps you can take to engage your audience without risking your online community’s safety.

The Two Main Types of Online Communities

Creating a thriving online community means taking risks. Some of those risks – like new content ideas not connecting with your audience – are worth taking. Other risks, such as your event derailed by harmful content, are different.

Fostering a positively engaged audience takes a variety of strategies. The methods you choose will depend on how you run your online community. For simplicity, let’s consider two examples: a public and a closed community. It is nice to note that an organization may have both kinds of communities for different purposes (i.e., a public community for lead generation vs. a closed community for customers).

  • A public online community is a situation where you throw the doors wide open and anybody can enter your event/community. For example, a media brand offering a live chat experience during an election or a championship sporting event might prefer a public event to maximize attendance numbers and potential advertising revenue. The fully open nature of this type of community means a heightened risk of inappropriate content.
  • A closed online community is limited in some fashion. This limitation can take a variety of forms. For example, you might charge an admission fee to join your event. Alternatively, your community might be invitation-based (i.e., only your top 100 customers are invited to an exclusive ‘customer council’ community). In contrast to a publicly accessible community, a closed online community will usually have far fewer attendees. The advantages of a closed community include a lower likelihood of disruptive people (i.e., “trolls”) and more common ground between participants.

Growing a Thriving Online Community: Essential Tools for Online Community Safety

Fostering a thriving and safe online community requires multiple strategies. Here are some effective and straightforward strategies to help you achieve it.

Leverage Technology To Filter Inappropriate Content

To eliminate the need for manually blocking and excluding harmful comments and messages, consider using a profanity filter. Basically, you’ll create a directory of forbidden words and expressions, that will be automatically blocked whenever they pop up in your community.

Arena offers a profanity filter that makes it easy to prevent the most common forms of inappropriate communication. Using this capability makes it much easier to create an environment safe for your audience. We’ll explore this capability in further detail below.

Establish Simple Community Guidelines

Aside from straightforward situations like using profanity, there is some disagreement about what counts as appropriate vs. inappropriate in the online world. For example, some communities love to debate and be passionate about sharing their opinions – which can be either wonderful or hurtful! Another approach is to create and use simple rules and ask all community participants to follow them.

For example, your online community might take inspiration from Reddit communities that often use rules such as: don’t be a jerk, promote self-promotion, keep discussions on topic, and moderators reserve the right to intervene.

Add Barriers To Entry For Your Community

Adding barriers to entry, such as requiring a user to register for an account or pay an admission fee, are an effective way to discourage disruptive behavior. Alternatively, your barrier to entry might be based on limited awareness – like only inviting people on your email list to join the event.

Optional: Role Play With Your Event Staff

For organizations planning to host events with a large number of attendees or a large number of events, additional training through role play is helpful. In this case, ask two to three employees to serve as event staff and ask 5-10 employees to take the role of participants. Secretly ask a few of the employee-participant to act disruptive and notice how this situation is handled.

Training your employees and encouraging positive behavior in your audience are some of the most powerful ways to maintain a safe community. Unfortunately, these strategies take time to develop. They are worth developing, but it is also vital to offer your community a certain baseline level of safety. That’s where Arena’s content moderation capabilities make a big difference.

Five Ways To Build A Safe Online Community with Arena

By using Arena Live Chat, you have several options to build a safe community. Each organization will use these options differ depending on its values and community needs. For the best results, invite your moderation team to become familiar with these tools.

1) Use The Profanity Filter

Reducing profanity is a key quick win to creating a safer online community. There is a built-in profanity list of commonly banned words. You can review, edit and update this list based on your needs. Once the filter detects a banned word, you can choose whether to replace the word with a series of asterisks (***) or block the user. Blocking users who use profanity may be wise in situations where the live chat includes children or controversial topics.

2) Review Reported Users

Arena Live Chat lets chat users report another user for inappropriate activities (e.g. inappropriate direct messages etc). During the live chat, review the reported users every few minutes and do a quick investigation. If the infraction is minor, you may decide to send a warning message to the user and delete their message. For more serious violations, see the next option.

3) Ban User and Delete Message

In some environments – especially public live chats with a large number of users – you may encounter highly inappropriate content (e.g. sexist, racist, or other violations of your policies). If these violations are ignored, it can embolden disruptive users. That’s why it is helpful to use the “Ban user and delete message” capability. Arena saves banned users in the organization’s dashboard so there’s less chance of suffering disruption in the future.

4) Delete Message

This moderation feature is a good choice for borderline inappropriate content. For example, you might choose to delete a message (rather than banning the user) if some users engage in self-promotion assuming your guidelines discourage that activity. Likewise, the delete message capability might also be useful when you see a rise in off-topic discussions.

What if you end up deleting a significant number of messages? Large live chat sessions that are fully open to the public tend to face this risk. Reinforcing your code of conduct expectations for the event can help. If problems persist, you may wish to consider using the pre-moderation feature to further control the flow of discussion.

5) Use The Pre-Moderation Feature To Maximize Brand Safety

Traditionally, a live chat experience emphasizes live interaction between users. Usually, it is best to encourage a free flow of conversation. Yet there are some situations where it’s appropriate to intervene more heavily by using pre-moderation. In essence, pre-moderation means that each message has to be manually approved by moderators before it shows up in the live chat window.

There are pros and cons to using pre-moderation in your live chat. The advantages are there you can filter out almost all inappropriate chat content. There are downsides though – moderator review of each message slows down the pace of the conversation significantly. As a result, your audience may become disengaged if they are kept waiting too long. The second disadvantage is that pre-moderation requires more effort from your team.

Conclusion

Maintaining a safer online community requires ongoing effort and the right tools. With Arena’s advanced moderation and engagement features, you can create a secure and welcoming environment for all users. Find out more about Arena’s social communities solution.

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How To Break Free From Social Media With An Arena Community

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Your growing engagement on Arena is easier when you build communities. Without communities, your marketing and content are more likely to fall flat. You can generate leads and maintain high engagement. Without your community, your users and customers may drift to social media platforms. Read on and learn how to break free from social media and build your own community with Arena.

Escape The Social Media Walled Garden With Arena

When you have a large and thriving community of users, subscribers, or customers, staying organized can get more complicated, especially when you implement marketing segmentation. For example, you probably want to offer a different community experience to your paying customers vs. potential customers. Creating multiple communities in your Arena account is one of the best ways to support your segmentation objectives.

There’s another reason to set up your social community with Arena. You need detailed customer data to fuel your marketing segmentation. You lose insights if your users leave your website to interact with each other on social media. Traditional social media platforms are also full of distractions – like notifications and ads. As a result, your audience may lose interest in your content. When you lose engagement, gaining conversions, sales, and advertising revenue become far more challenging.

Can You Make The World A Better Place With Arena?

Beyond supporting your marketing efforts, there are other reasons why establishing your community with Arena is worthwhile. A growing body of research shows that traditional social media platforms are harmful to users. For example, the Guardian reported that Instagram was harmful to mental health. Similar criticisms have pointed at other popular services like TikTok and Facebook. Fortunately, there are ways to connect online while minimizing these harmful effects.

The solution starts with building your online community. Your community is likely to be much smaller than TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, and that is a critical advantage. Maintaining standards becomes very difficult and expensive when an online platform has hundreds of millions of users. On the other hand, cultivating a digital community with a few hundred or thousands of participants who share common goals is a different matter entirely. For example, you can use Arena to engage your top 500 customers in an exclusive community. That means setting community standards and fostering positive engagement is far easier. When your organization becomes known for offering a positive, well-managed community, it will become far easier to grow an engaged audience.

Unified Communities vs. Separate Communities: Which Is Right For You?

Your first decision is to decide what kind of community experience you want to offer through Arena. You have two options: Separate vs. Unified. Let’s take a look at how these different options work.

Unified Communities

Using unified communities is a good choice if your organization focuses on a single target market or segment. In addition, unified communities are well suited to smaller organizations. If you have a single person tasked with engaging your community, focus on unified communities.

Separate Communities

In contrast, separate communities are a better fit for larger companies. For example, a publisher or media company might have multiple segments of subscribers – people interested in sports, those interested in business news, and those concerned with politics. When you have multiple segments with little in common, there’s value in creating separate communities. 

Now that you know the difference between these ways of using communities, it’s time to set up your community in Arena.

Creating Communities Step By Step

The following over-the-shoulder guide explains exactly how to create your community in Arena.

1) Open your Arena Account

Adding more communities to your Arena account is simple.

  • Log into your account and click on your logo in the top left corner of the page. 
  • When the menu appears, click the “Sites & Organizations Settings” button.
  • Click the Add New Button

2) Add New Organization

Your next step is to create a new organization. For example, let’s say you will run a virtual conference later this year. You might want to create a new organization to keep that event organized.

If you have been following along from Step 1, you will see the “Sites and Organizations” screen (shown below). Click the purple “New Organization” button on the right-hand side of the page.

3) Add A Site

Within your organization in Arena, you can set up multiple sites. To explain why this is valuable, let’s continue with the example of running a conference. Let’s say you have a company conference, and several people will attend the event, such as VIP customers, the sales team, and partners. Each of these groups has its own needs, so creating a separate site for each group can be valuable. 

Of course, you can also simply create a single site if that is a better fit for you. Adding additional sites to your account may require additional fees. Reach out to your Arena rep if you have any questions.

To create a new site, fill in the required information:

  • Website Name
  • URL
  • Organization
  • Subscription Plan
  • Connect Social Media Site (optional but recommended)

4) Customize Your New Site

By default, your new site will have placeholder information. We recommend updating your site with a custom profile photo to inspire trust in your audience. You can use your logo or the photo of a well-known person in your organization if you prefer.

Updating your site’s profile photo is simple:

  • Click on “Site Settings”
  • Click on the circle above “Website Name”
  • Choose the photo you want to use and then click Update.

See the following screenshot:

At this point, your community and site are set up. In other words, your blank canvas is in position. It’s now time to plan your engagement strategy. For example, you might decide to plan a virtual conference. In that case, see our guide to grow engagement with virtual communities.

How To End Your Dependence on Social Media

Imagine if you could create your version of Facebook or Instagram but focused on your community’s needs. That’s possible with Arena. Learn more about how you can create a social community for your users.

Virtual Team Building: 16 Great Ideas to Boost Employee Engagement

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In today’s remote work environment, keeping teams connected and employees engaged it’s more important than ever, but it can be challenging. Virtual team building activities offer creative ways to promote remote team engagement, enhance communication, and boost morale.

From virtual happy hours to online workshops, these activities can help maintain a strong team spirit and ensure everyone feels part of the community. Let’s explore why virtual team building is important and what are some of the events you can promote to boost employee engagement. 

Why Virtual Team Building is Essential

In an effort to save money, many companies might think that team building activities are a waste of resources, especially when we talk about remote teams. However, there are plenty of reasons why remote team engagement activities are essential to building lasting connections with your employees. 

Let’s dive right into them.

Strengthening Trust

Trust is the cornerstone of swift and effective collaboration, particularly in high-stakes situations. Initiatives like virtual games and interactive sessions pave the way for establishing and nurturing this trust, leading to enhanced performance and quality.

Enhancing Communication Skills

Effective communication is the underpinning of successful sales, marketing, and even internal operations across different departments. By fostering virtual camaraderie, we cultivate an environment where communication flourishes.

Reinforcing Organizational Culture

The importance of company culture is universal. Especially in fast-growing teams, ensuring that the company’s core values are constantly reinforced prevents potential cultural erosion.

Boosting Employee Engagement, Retention and Satisfaction

The significance of recognizing and appreciating employees cannot be emphasized enough. Recognition can manifest in various forms, from awards to acknowledging personal milestones. Such gestures prevent feelings of isolation and play a crucial role in talent retention.

Community Building 

Communities are all about connections. When you allow your employees to bond beyond their daily activities, you offer them an opportunity to connect in new ways with their peers, growing a sense of belonging and enhancing employee engagement.

The easiest way to host events and enable conversations is through a centralized community engagement hub, where you can concentrate all valuable information and allow employees to interact with each other, even after the event is through. 

16 Ideas for Virtual Team Building Events

Embarking on virtual team building can be both simple and effective, depending on which tools you choose to host these kinds of meetings. There are now many no-code alternatives that can offer a seamless experience for both organizers and attendees, and, if you’re not sure which one suits you best, take a look at our guide to the top 10 virtual conference platforms. 

As for virtual team building strategies, you can start small, with modest activities that help your team familiarize themselves with the format. Once you get comfortable, you can explore several creative and engaging events. 

Below, you’ll find 16 remote team engagement ideas, ranging from simple to more complex events. These activities are designed to foster collaboration, enhance communication, and build stronger relationships within your remote team.

 

1) Introducing Virtual Icebreakers

An effortless way to embark on this journey is to weave icebreakers into routine virtual meetings, such as All-Hands Meetings, especially when there are new team members. Occasional exercises like “Two Truths and a Lie” or “Would You Rather” questions can set a relaxed and engaging tone for discussions.

2) Trivia Challenges

Trivia games are an excellent tool for fostering team spirit and knowledge sharing. Tailoring questions around company updates or general knowledge can spur participation and bonding.

3) Virtual Scavenger Hunts

This is a playful way to get team members to share a slice of their personal lives, from household items to tech gadgets. For more intricate events, virtual scavenger hunt apps like Let’s Roam or Scavify can be a game-changer.

4) Engage in Online Games

For those pressed for time, online games can be a quick-fix solution. Platforms like Skribbl or CardsMania can be an excellent starting point. To ensure an interactive gaming experience, Arena Live Chat can be seamlessly integrated, offering real-time communication capabilities.

5) Virtual Celebrations for Employee Recognition

Dedicating time during meetings to spotlight achievements or milestones, both professional and personal, can significantly boost morale and foster community feeling.

6) Host Virtual Happy Hours 

Traditional bonding over drinks can be virtualized, where team members join from the comfort of their homes. Gift cards can incentivize participation, ensuring a relaxed and informal atmosphere.

7) Virtual Executive Socials

Creating a platform for informal interactions between executives and employees can break hierarchical barriers and foster mutual respect and understanding.

8) Weekly Sharing Sessions

Encourage team members to share valuable resources, be it apps, websites, or books, enhancing the collective knowledge pool and encouraging innovation.

9) Randomized Virtual Coffee Chat

Want to foster individual connections within your team? You can do this without any intricate tech or virtual team building platforms. This concept mirrors the day-to-day interactions that make workplace dynamics lively. You merely shuffle participants’ names and pair them up.

10) Virtual Fitness Quest

Warm seasons call for outdoor activities. A month-long fitness challenge can be the nudge for colleagues to embrace health targets. Utilize an honor code for activity tracking and let everyone share their progress. 

Kickstart this by rallying fitness enthusiasts who can act as influencers within their teams and organize incentives for those who complete the quest. Conclude with a virtual gathering showcasing photos, and videos, and applauding top performers.

11) Online Cycling Expeditions

This mirrors the fitness quest, but it focuses on biking. It resonates especially if situated in bike-friendly cities, and it can even be paired with a sustainability initiative for your business. Perhaps, enlist a biking professional to share insights and increase employee engagement. 

12) Digital Summer Festivities

Revel in the spirit of a summer cookout, virtually. Consider:

  • Scheduling nuances, since summer months are prime for leave.
  • Geographical considerations. Ensure the theme caters to the majority.
  • Personalize the theme. If mainstream holidays don’t resonate, label it something generic like “Online Summer Soiree”.

13) Online Cooking Classes

Many of your employees might have a keen interest in home cooking, as well as sharing their favorite dishes and, of course, learning new recipes. An online cooking class is the perfect opportunity to gather colleagues to expand their repertoire and engage with each other while doing so.

14) Engage a Role-playing Game

Expert Board games like online Dungeons & Dragons are surging as team cohesion tools. While lengthy and intricate, professionals can streamline the experience, ensuring a blend of entertainment and team bonding.

15) Online Language Immersion Sessions

Got a multicultural workforce? This could be your ace. From spotlighting a specific language on a relevant holiday to consistent weekly sessions, the camaraderie from learning together is irreplaceable.

16) Digital Corporate Literature Circles

Cultivate a reading and learning culture within your team. Suggest employees list top business reads and consider roping in the authors for an interactive session. Even if that’s unfeasible, an engaging discussion on a practical business book can be enlightening.

How to Prepare for Virtual Team Building Events

Besides choosing the theme for your internal event and setting a date, there are some steps you need to follow in order to have a great virtual employee engagement event. Here’s a practical breakdown:

1. Choose a platform that enables you to easily create an event, preferably with an integrated live chat.

2. Do a breakdown of the event specifics. Organize the agenda, see if there are any specialists, teachers or speakers that should be brought in, and plan the pre and post-event marketing strategy.

3. Announce the event 30 days beforehand to promote internally and gather attendees. Don’t forget to send sporadic reminders to your team across your internal channels. 

4. Partner with internal influencers and leaders who can advocate for the event among peers to raise awareness about the initiative. 

5. Host the event, taking note of how employees are reacting to the content that is being brought to them. 

6. After the event, solicit attendees’ opinions to understand what they enjoyed, and cross that information with the internal data you have available.

Optimize Your Digital Event with Prime Tools

Hosting virtual team building events is essential for growing employee engagement and fostering a strong community, even when team members are physically distant. By investing in regular virtual events, companies can ensure their remote teams remain motivated, engaged, and united, ultimately driving better performance and satisfaction.

Arena Community and Live Chat are invaluable tools for facilitating virtual team building. They provide real-time communication and interaction, making it easy to host engaging activities and keep your remote team connected. With these tools, you can seamlessly organize and manage events that bring your team together, create a sense of connection and belonging, promote collaboration, and boost morale.

don’t leave ad revenue on the table

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Live blog monetization is a new, reliable way to add a revenue stream to your news website. Pay attention if increasing advertising revenue is a priority for your business model. We’ll show why and how live blogging is powerful.

Who Is Live Blogging For?

The first live blogs were run by major news organizations like newspapers and TV networks. Today, blog owners, video content creators, and others can use a live blog. This monetization feature on your website makes growing fan engagement much easier.

Live blogging has an advantage over relying on third-party platforms like Facebook Live, Instagram Live, or YouTube. When you publish original content on your website with a live blog, your audience will have a compelling reason to keep coming back. When your audience spends time on your website instead of your Facebook page, you’ll see several benefits.

Live Blog Monetization: Why Use Arena?

There are multiple ways to add a live blog to your digital publishing platform. With all your choices, there are several good reasons to use Arena.

  • Simple, Fast Installation

Do you have a breaking news style opportunity right now? You can install Arena Live Blog and be up and running in minutes. Arena is fast and easy to use, so you can start generating advertising revenue quickly.

  • Google AdSense Integration

Google AdSense is one of the most popular methods to generate advertising revenue. Arena has a built-in integration so that you can earn more AdSense revenue from your live blog. If you rely on AdSense today, Arena Live Blog will help you earn even more from Google.

  • Conversion Cards Expands Revenue Beyond Ads

Earning revenue from ads is powerful. What if your business model includes more than ads? For example, media brands often want to get more paid subscribers. Other companies are interested in lead generation and driving purchases. 

We know companies want advertising revenue, leads, and sales. That’s why we build Conversion Cards. Adding a Conversion Card to your live blog makes it easy to generate leads, get more subscribers, and sell more products. You can pick and choose when to use Conversion Cards on your publishing platform.

  • Attract More Organic Traffic From Search Engines

Unlike a conventional blog post, a live blog makes it easy to create and post new updates. Some of the most successful live blogs are updated every 5-10 minutes where there is breaking news or exciting developments. Those frequent updates send a positive signal to search engines like Google that your website has up-to-date content. You are likely to get more traffic if you are posting quality content that helps people. As your traffic grows, you’ll get more advertising revenue and opportunities to grow your conversions.

Advertising Revenue Vs. Other Revenue Streams

Adding an additional revenue stream is important because it is simple and easy. Your website displays the ad, and you get paid. In contrast, selling digital products, managing affiliate programs, or shipping physical products is much more difficult. Without live blog monetization, your live stream content might excite people, but what if your audience isn’t in the mood to buy? When you have advertising in place, the online event will still bring in revenue.

No rule says you have to choose between advertising revenue and selling products. Many media brands sell physical products, and subscriptions and generate advertising revenue. For example, the New York Times and the BBC.

Running A Live Blog On Your Website Vs. Relying On Social Media

Adding a live blog to your website adds tremendous value to your business. While installing Arena only takes a matter of minutes, there is a learning curve if you are used to social media platforms like Instagram Stories, Facebook Shops, and Facebook Gaming. It’s natural for business owners, publishers and marketers to use their business profiles on social platforms especially when you have a large following.

Relying on a third-party platform exclusively to grow your audience engagement has significant challenges. For example, when you run an event on a social media website you will not get the same depth of information for your customer data platform. That lack of data means it is much more difficult to build a relationship with your audience, follow up or get conversions. 

When you have live blog monetization in place, you have more options. For example, your live blog can augment a virtual event with a video streaming platform. This means you could run a virtual conference with a live stream video presentation. However, search engines (and people!) don’t always like to use video exclusively. By augmenting your virtual events with a live blog, you can pull in more organic traffic. 

Three Ways To Boost Live Blog Monetization This Month

Once you have your live blog installed and configured, how exactly do you use it to drive more advertising revenue? Start with these five ideas to grow your advertising revenue in the next 30 days.

1) Celebrate Company News With A Live Blog

Company news – especially product releases – is prime material for a live blog. Just think about the excitement that comes with Google and Apple’s annual conferences. While new products are great to highlight, that is not your only option. Other types of company news such as an expansion to a new country or new integrations can also work well for a live blog.

2) Augment A Virtual Event or Conference With A Live Blog

Look through your events and marketing calendar for the next few weeks. Is your company offering any digital events, virtual conferences or other experiences for your audience? If the answer is yes, add a live blog to drive engagement up further.

Imagine you are running a one-day virtual event for your customers. Some attendees might attend the morning sessions while others may only show up for the keynote. By adding a live blog to the experience, you can provide key quotes, summaries and commentary on each part of the virtual event. That means your audience can learn and engage with the event content if they prefer to read over viewing video. After the event ends, the live blog will continue to help you attract organic search traffic to your website.

By the way, your live blog can help to increase live event engagement if you offer access replays to your audience. The excitement of seeing a live blog updated continuously during an event wouldn’t be available when viewing a recording. If there are other incentives to attend live (e.g. a promo code), you may be able to lift live engagement further.

3) Offer “Piggy Back” Live Blog Coverage

What if your company has no company news or virtual events coming up in the next month or so? In that case, there are still opportunities to run a compelling live blog but it does require a bit more creativity.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm with your team about what your audience is currently interested in, excited by or worried about. For example, a live blog experience in August or September might connect to the “back to school” season or the start of the football season. If there are breaking news stories that excite your audience, consider running a live blog about those events on your website.

This approach isn’t limited to consumer audiences either. Let’s say your goal is to connect with investors interested in up-to-the-minute coverage. In that case, look for economic announcements like the monthly jobs report released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every month, there is significant coverage of this announcement. Your organization might decide to offer a short live blog session when the jobs report comes out. Help investors explore the implications such as which industries are growing and which parts of the country are struggling. If this live blog is a hit with your audience, you could transform it into an ongoing series and build a highly engaged audience.

Unlike the first two ways of using a live blog, providing commentary and coverage of an event may not be suitable for every company. It’s a natural fit for media companies, especially those with a specialized focus (e.g. banking news or tech news). It can also work with other types of companies. Keep in mind that it may be more difficult to get conversions or sales. When you have a live blog about company news like new product announcements, customers will have their credit cards to buy to some degree. In contrast, a person looking for general news coverage might not be in a spending mindset so generating direct revenue might be more difficult. 

Live Blog Monetization: Where To Go From Here?

Live blog monetization is one of the best ways to engage your audience, grow advertising revenue and build your brand. Unlike running an event on a social media platform, you have the opportunity to collect rich customer data. That’s critically important as we move into the cookieless future. Learn more about live blog here. 

 

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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!

Grow Engagement With A Virtual Community

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Building a virtual community is a powerful way to have a positive impact. Online communities have tremendous flexibility in terms of time and participation. Yet many organizations miss opportunities to enrich their live events with an online community platform.

What Is A Virtual Community?

There are various ways to define a virtual community. Some researchers focus on questions of social identity, but our definition is more straightforward: a virtual community is a group of people who communicate digitally around a shared interest.

For example, there is a thriving virtual community in many parts of the technology industry. If you want to ask questions and get advice about Microsoft, Salesforce, and other platforms, there is an online community for those interests. Many virtual communities are also dedicated to sports, movies, TV shows and hobbies.

For publishers and companies, starting or growing a virtual community or even a series of online communities has significant attractions.

The Pros and Cons of A Virtual Community

Starting and growing a virtual community has multiple benefits for your community members and the event organizer. Here are some of the essential benefits to keep in mind.

Pros of Having a Virtual Community

Establishing a virtual community for your audience offers significant benefits, including making it easy to find warm leads.

  • Get More Leads

Thriving online communities related to your company are a ready source of potential leads. With the right approach, your community may act as a sounding board for new product ideas and as early adopters. While that is an exciting benefit, your virtual community has to offer your community members appealing benefits, or you will lose people over time.

  • Increase Engagement

For some organizations, like online media companies, growing audience engagement is their top goal. For publishers seeking to maintain or grow their paid subscriber base, offering a virtual community goes a long way toward achieving those goals. Online community growth becomes more manageable when your audience responds to new posts, announcements, and more. A more engaged audience is more likely to purchase and engage with advertising.

  • Differentiate Your Brand

You’ve probably spent considerable time and effort creating a distinct and memorable brand. Yet few people outside the company likely understand your brand promise as profoundly as you might hope. Most potential customers are thinking about their families, needs, and problems – your brand probably doesn’t come to mind too often.

That’s where offering a compelling virtual community makes a positive impact. When people associate your brand with a community of friends who share their interests, your brand will become more appealing. Over time, a strong community can translate into significant brand loyalty and a greater willingness to accept premium prices.

  • Improve Mental Health

Seeing mental health on this list might surprise you because it may not be one of your goals. However, giving people access to a solid online community where they can connect with others who share their interests matters. Developing a positive and inclusive virtual community may help people reduce anxiety and the impact of other problems like loneliness.

That said, a thriving online community hub is not the same thing as treatment. But every bit of positive human connection your community offers can help people get through a rough time.

Cons of Having an Online Community

While there is much to be said about running a virtual community, there are some disadvantages to keep in mind.

  • Virtual Community Is A Long-Term Strategy

Developing a thriving virtual community will yield results, but these results often take years to yield fruit. In that sense, a running virtual community tends to produce better results when running alongside other marketing strategies. That said, there is a shortcut to building a virtual community faster, which we will reveal in the next section.

  • A Virtual Community Requires Leadership and Content

Most thriving online communities revolve around leaders and content. For many small businesses, the founder may act as the leader, content creator, and community facilitator. In a larger organization, these roles can be shared among several people. In the long term, it is sometimes possible to recruit members of your community as well.

In the beginning, expect to invest considerable sweat equity in your virtual community. A successful content strategy is vital to making the community attractive. Without an appealing content strategy, it will be hard to see the value of your community. When the community is small, take the time to interact with each new member who signs up.

  • A Virtual Community Requires The Right Technology

Setting up the technology needed to launch a digital community may feel daunting. At a minimum, a virtual community needs message board capabilities so that people can post messages and receive a community response. While useful, a message board is probably not enough to make your virtual community appealing. Instead, take inspiration from thriving online communities (e.g., the gaming community), which include video chat, live chat, and virtual events.

One Shortcut To Jump Start Your Virtual Community

Developing a thriving virtual community takes time, but there is one way to accelerate the process: events. Specifically, running a virtual or hybrid event can help ignite your community’s growth. Unlike a simple online message board, events are different.

In contrast to an always-available online group, an event is a limited and scarce experience. Since the event occurs at a specific time and place, there is a real sense of scarcity. That scarcity helps to make the event more valuable. Furthermore, a virtual event that uses a proven process, like our virtual event checklist, is well organized and tends to offer relevant content to participants.

How To Bridge The Gap Between Virtual And Real Communities

The value of connecting a virtual community and a traditional community is all about finding the best of both worlds. Let’s look at a few examples in both the corporate and educational settings that illustrate the power of these events.

Specifically, adding live chat to your online events makes a tremendous difference in bringing your community together. With live chat, you can get feedback from your peers, answer questions and build connections.

Bringing Together In Persona And Virtual Communities For Companies

The booming popularity of remote and hybrid work arrangements has delivered considerable benefits. Flexible schedules and greater work-life balance are precious. Yet the lack of real-time interaction over coffee or lunch can make it more difficult to form strong relationships. The critical technology to enable these virtual communities is implementing a live chat, because it makes it easy and simple to share comments, questions and more.

To enrich your community, start with these virtual community and virtual event ideas.

Annual Company Conference

Many companies run annual conferences to connect with their customers, recognize top performers and announce important events. Adding a virtual community to this type of corporate event helps in several ways. First, you can accommodate more participants, including those who might be unable to travel to the event in person. Second, you can extend the conference experience before and after the official conference date. For example, you might launch “teaser videos” about the conference keynote speakers in advance to spark greater excitement.

Sales Kick Off

Supporting the company sales team is a critical leadership responsibility. Success in sales requires perseverance in the face of pressure, disappointment, and stress. Offering encouragement, relevant training, and other resources in a sales kick-off event can help the sales team to thrive.

Enriching your sales kick-off event with a virtual community helps deepen the event’s value. For example, you might invite a sales expert like Jeb Blount about one of his books, “Fanatical Prospecting” or “Selling The Price Increase.” To support your team in applying the lessons of the book covered in the keynote, set up a virtual community where people can come together to share their wins, questions, and other comments weekly.

Recruitment Events

Attracting high-quality graduates and employees to work for your organization is becoming more difficult in many countries. As of July 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US unemployment has fallen to 3.5%. In other words, many workers have choices. New methods like recruitment strategies are needed for employers seeking to compete for the best talent.

Enhancing recruitment with a virtual community starts with taking a long-term view of talent. Instead of engaging students when they are a few months away from graduation, start earlier. This might take the form of establishing a virtual community for your summer internship program. Give your current and prospective employees a chance to interact with your current staff, ask questions and find out why they should consider working with you.

By the way, you don’t have to restrict yourself to cultivating graduates and younger professionals only. For inspiration, look at the virtual communities that the world’s leading consulting firms have long cultivated. PwC, a global leader in accounting and consulting, runs a US alumni program that offers on-demand learning to help alumni succeed, networking opportunities, and career opportunities for former employees.

Fostering Higher Education Using Virtual Communities

For colleges and universities, virtual communities can make an even greater impact. The following introduces a few opportunities. For a comprehensive guide to virtual event ideas in higher education, see our post: 60 Awesome University Virtual Events Ideas. Organizing a virtual event series is a powerful way to grow your virtual community.

Just make sure that you include live chat so that your students, alumni and other community members can easily participate – not everybody likes to appear on video after all.

College Orientation

Many colleges and universities have reported lower enrollment numbers over the past few years. The pandemic, high costs and the growth of alternative online learning opportunities have some questioning the value of traditional post-secondary education.

Offering a robust college orientation experience is one way that campus leaders reach out to their students. In addition to traditional orientation activities and parties, look for ways to build a virtual community that starts before students arrive on campus.

The assigned reading of new books includes memoirs, novels, essays and other works. For example, the University of Delaware assigned “While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World” by Ahmed M. Badr. Meanwhile, Siena College has assigned the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Nickel Boys” to new students. Giving students a book to read before they arrive on campus gives them a tangible connection to campus long before they show up in person.

These reading recommendations help to give students common ground with their peers and to start their learning journey. Why not invite students to join a virtual community where they can discuss the book and raise other questions before they arrive on campus?

College Career Fair

After paying thousands of dollars in fees, many students are hungry to discover their career opportunities. Traditional career fair events offer invaluable networking opportunities. These events are not accessible to all students, especially those with significant family or work commitments. Asking a student to give up a paying shift to attend an event may not be realistic in some cases.

Offering a virtual community to support college career events makes a big difference. For instance, you can invite students to join sub-groups focused on exploring certain professions like accounting, nursing, nonprofits, or engineering. By giving students more time and space to come up with questions and seek support, students are more likely to discover various career paths.

Alumni Organization

Once students leave campus, that doesn’t mean they have left the college community. Many colleges have long-established alumni associations that organize events, networking databases, and other resources. Keeping alumni engaged with valuable insights and opportunities means your alumni are more likely to be open to making donations and volunteering. Just think about the opposite case – what if you only heard from your college alumni association when they had a donation campaign? It might feel like a one-way relationship, and such relationships tend not to last long.

What if you’re not sure what to offer your alumni? Take inspiration from the McMaster University Alumni Association. In 2020, they solicited feedback from their alumni and received dozens of suggestions, including requests for online events. Many of these suggestions could be integrated into a virtual community format. For instance, one alumnus requested computer skill training for older people curious about digital technology.

Get Started Building Your Virtual Community

Starting a virtual community is an exciting journey, but it’s not one you should take alone. Find out about Arena’s Social & Communities page for more information on how we can help you grow faster.