Category Archives: Customer Data Platform

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.

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!

Why Virtual Events Are Better With Live Chat: 9 Reasons

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Virtual events and hybrid events have boomed in popularity recently. More companies are using a chat platform for live events to make their events more interactive. Your event team can see and answer questions and encourage connections with a chat service. 

If you’re new to offering a chat experience in your virtual events, use our tips to grow audience engagement, increase your attendee count and offer a memorable attendee experience. 

Nine Reasons Why Companies Are Adding Live Chat To Virtual Events

Here are a few ways adding a chat tool can help your live events strategy. Live chat is influential in lifting sales, marketing, and growing your online audiences. Let’s start by looking at how virtual events powered by live chat grows top-line revenue.

How To Get More Sales With Virtual Events and Live Chat

The sales team can benefit from live chat in several ways. For the best results, invite a few people from sales to each chat experience you run. If they cannot attend live, offer to provide the chat transcript for their review after the event.

1) Get Warm Leads

A warm lead is someone who already knows, likes, and trusts your brand to some degree. From a sales perspective, converting warm leads into customers is usually easier and faster. 

Let’s say that you have 100 chat users in your virtual event chat. Following up with all event attendees is worthwhile, but the follow-up process should be tailored. Review questions and comments chat users post in the chat module. A person who asks about product pricing, shipping, or features is likely to be a high-quality warm lead. Such a lead merits immediate follow-up.

Use the attendee report as a resource for the rest of your chat participants. For example, you may have ten warm leads and 90 other chat users. The sales team will immediately respond to the warm leads. Engage the rest of your chat users using your marketing engagement platform. Check to see if your chat options include the functionality to export a transcript and attendee report so that you can quickly identify the right people to interact with.

2) Deepen Product Knowledge

The ability to answer product questions in a detailed and persuasive manner is crucial for sales. Paying attention to the questions and comments that business professionals and other attendees ask in your chat session has training value. Attending streaming events alongside customers is a powerful way to keep your sales team informed about the latest features and product developments.

After each virtual event, compile a list of the most common questions. Share these questions with the sales team. It may help better interact with prospects during sales calls and meetings.

3) Improve Sales Win Rates With Market Understanding

Understanding your customers’ needs, problems, and concerns is vital to sales success. When a salesperson attends a virtual event, they have a chance to see their customers in action. In particular, sales reps can deepen their understanding of the market by looking for the following:

Questions, especially those questions asked more than once, can help the salesperson improve their prospecting. Knowing the questions prospects tend to ask means you can develop better pitches. Customer feedback can also improve sales presentation slide decks and similar resources.

Reviewing chat messages for problems that people mention is helpful. For example, your prospects may not know that your company offers advanced analytics. If you see users complaining about working with data, paying attention to problems can help.

These benefits for the sales team are significant for newer salespeople who may not know your product and market deeply.

What A Chat Platform For Live Events Improves Marketing Results 

A chat platform can help you reach your key marketing metrics faster and more efficiently. As you become more familiar and skilled with running virtual events, these marketing benefits will compound over time.

4) Boost Engagement

What if your users attended a company conference and could not interact with anybody? That would be a painfully dull event, and those attendees would be less likely to register for future virtual events you offer.

Several factors matter in creating a compelling virtual event like offering a high quality of video, exciting content, and a sense of community connection. Adding live chat to your virtual events transforms your virtual event from a boring lecture to a community experience.

While attendee questions to your company are highly valuable, it is smart to encourage community connections as well. For example, you might organize breakout sessions where current customers can share their experiences with each other and prospects.

5) Increase Time Spent On Your Content

According to SEMrush, the average worldwide bounce rate for all websites is 30%. However, several industries have a bounce rate of over 40% including news & media, real estate, and groceries. When users leave your website quickly, it’s tough to build a connection.

Offering a virtual event with chat apps gives you the power to cut your bounce rate down. When a person signs up for a virtual event, they are usually planning to attend for an extended period of time. As a result, bounce rates fall. By maintaining low bounce rates and engagement, you have an excellent opportunity to grow organic search traffic.

Further, highly engaged prospects are more likely to give you useful feedback about your concern. That qualitative feedback is a useful supplement to your customer data platform. Over time, you will be better able to predict the types of content that reliably connect with customers.

By increasing time on site through virtual events and live chat, you have more opportunities to present calls to action for your users. That means more leads for your sales team to engage after the event.

6) Earn Google’s Trust (and Traffic) 

In digital marketing, the term “E-A-T” has recently gained popularity. The EAT acronym means “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.” Becoming a trusted authority in your industry takes deliberate effort over time. It includes publishing useful articles, videos and other resources on your website.

In addition, you can earn credibility through virtual events and by offering a chat window. For example, you can harness the power of content curation. Imagine you are running a tax accounting firm. Earning the attention and trust of accounting clients is challenging. That’s where organizing live events with a chat service helps. 

Global accounting firm Deloitte offered a virtual conference in May 2022 with live presenters and engagement tools. While the Deloitte event was aimed at accounting professionals seeking continuing education, similar events on tax (e.g. tax planning strategies) could be offered to clients. The Deloitte virtual event included two partners serving in co-host roles. Having more than one event host is wise, especially when your virtual events span several days.

An accounting firm that offers tax planning virtual events from December to March can earn trust. The firm can invite speakers to discuss changes to tax laws and regulations that may help their clients save money or avoid audits. Furthermore, you can record the virtual event and then use the transcript to create additional expertise-boosting content assets.

Pursuing E-A-T with live events and live chat also matters for media companies and publishers. Your staff editors, experts, and contributors will draw in the core audience. But why stop there? Increase credibility further by adding more diverse voices to your coverage. For example, you could invite a few well-regarded social media influencers to serve as remote presenters and chat with participants. Those influencers will lend your event more credibility and further grow your audience.

7) Make Your Virtual Events More Compelling With A Social Event

Recent research from Harvard University found that 36% of all Americans experience loneliness. Your virtual events play a role in addressing the loneliness and isolation epidemic. Your virtual event will help people connect with others who share their interests and passions by offering live chat. 

To further encourage social connections and networking, offer a mix of experiences in your virtual event. It is especially important to provide breakout sessions and small group experiences. These smaller group gatherings make it easier for your audience to connect with each other. 

Growing Your Audience With Chat-Powered Virtual Events

Online publishers and media companies are increasingly turning to online events as a strategy to grow their audience. Adding live chat makes publisher virtual events more effective in several ways.

8) Increase Subscriber Retention

In publishing, it is traditional to put significant effort into acquiring paying subscribers. Retaining subscribers is a different story. Your subscribers have many different demands on their attention. One-quarter of American households pay for at least three streaming services today. 

Offering virtual events supported by live chat as a subscriber-only benefit is a powerful way to keep your subscribers engaged.

9) Develop Strategic Alliances With Virtual Events

Alliances with influencers, experts, and authors can all play a role in helping you to grow your audience. As you plan your event series, set a goal to include special guests interesting to your audience. 

The Wall St Journal has a conference series called WSJ Live that includes online events for different executive audiences like CIO Exchange and the CMO Network Member Breakout. You may not have the Wall St Journal’s resources, but this strategy can be adapted. For example, a lifestyle publication might offer virtual events with up-and-coming chefs to spotlight the most exciting restaurants.

What To Look For In Your Live Chat Tool

You’ve seen many ways a live chat app can lift marketing, sales, and audience growth results. Now, you might be wondering – which chat tool is right for you? Arena Live Chat is a great choice, of course. If you’re curious to compare and contrast Arena to other platforms, there are a few key features to keep in mind.

To successfully use live chat for live events, make sure your app includes the following:

When you offer virtual events to your event attendees, participating in live chat should be seamless. That’s why it is essential to have a chat widget appear on your website. There’s nothing for your attendees to install.

During event chat sessions, emotions may run high. Often, that’s a great sign of highly engaged attendees. However, there is also a risk of inappropriate content and chats. Providing detailed instructions to your event moderators is one way to reduce inappropriate behavior. In larger events, chat event moderation is easier when you have a chat tool that automatically filters profanity.

Think of your virtual event as a traditional conference. Some people will be happy to raise their hand and ask a question in public – like posting a question in a public chat. Other people prefer to raise questions and comments privately. Your audience chat experience should include both a public chat room and the capability to send private chat messages back and forth.

It’s crucial to select a live chat platform that works for you today and your future events. 

Today, you might run virtual events for a few dozen attendees. Attendance will increase as your audience grows and more people become interested in your online events. Check to see if your live chat tool can accommodate larger audiences.

Planning a successful virtual event takes time and effort. Your event technology should not add to the burden. Make sure you select a live chat tool that is simple and easy to install and configure. Likewise, your event team should be able to set up events in minutes without resorting to complicated instructions.

Want to see how Arena Live Chat performs? Contact us today to request a demo and you can see how our platform enhances virtual events.

Ready To Try Live Chat For Free?

Now that you know how Live Chat tools can enhance events, your next step is to try a Live Chat Tool. Arena’s group Live Chat tool is simple and allows you to create and embed a chat to your site in minutes. You can see how easy it is to set up in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c2aNilRUqM

Increase Live Stream Engagement: 11 Tactics That Work

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Do you want more live stream engagement from your target audience? It’s getting more complex. The competition for viewer engagement is significant.

For example, in a 2020 study, the top three distractions for US employees working from home include social media, smartphones, and binge-watching content. These distractions make it difficult to maintain high levels of live stream engagement.

Whether you are focused on a product launch or other types of virtual events, video streaming technology can help. When you have the right content ideas, delivering engaging content gets much easier. Use these live streaming tips and examples below to create your rough plan to lift streaming engagement over time.

What Is A Live Stream?

A live stream is an online video broadcast where an individual or group of people appear on video to engage with their audience. As a rule of thumb, the live stream experience often includes screen sharing and individuals appearing on camera.

Typically, there are two ways that companies use a live stream to earn revenue. Some companies earn revenue by selling advertising space or sponsorships, especially in entertainment. Most live stream companies use it as part of their content strategy to attract prospects and fill their sales funnel.

Why Now Is The Time To Add Video Streaming To Your Marketing Strategy

Streaming sessions have fast become one of the best ways to attract prospects to your sales funnel. By 2027, the live stream market is projected to grow to $250 billion. The most successful early adopters of livestream video have been in the entertainment niche. Millions of people watch gamers play their favorite video games on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.

The stream experience is not limited to gamers, though. Live stream sessions are increasingly being used to sell products (i.e., live shopping), promote products, and supercharge influencer marketing campaigns.

The growth of Live Stream Video Sessions is Booming, as Shown in the Following Statistics:

Investing in live streaming now means you have the opportunity to win in the marketplace as an early adopter.

This finding reveals that live streaming video experiences can become a profit center! Take note of media and entertainment brands looking for ways to grow their subscriber base!

There’s a reason why so many YouTubers and other online content creators encourage their viewers to like and comment on their videos. These techniques are proven to grow their audience.

That doesn’t mean you have to improvise every moment of the session. By all means, script out your content ideas so that you have a rough plan to follow.

Live stream content must be part of your marketing strategy if your target audience includes younger consumers.

This pattern is especially common in industries like apparel, fashion, and beauty, where a video demonstration adds value. It can be difficult to imagine if a piece of clothing or makeup is right for you. Seeing a popular influencer try out these products can make a big difference in conversions.

To grow engagement in your online events, live streaming deserves a place in your strategy. The good news is that you probably already have plenty of content ideas if your company has already published successful social media posts, blog posts, and other forms of content.

Four Companies Winning With Live Streaming

If you’re excited about the potential of adding live stream engagement to your company, your might be wondering: who else is succeeding with live streaming? Several businesses have are successfully using the power of live video to sell products, generate leads and grow their audiences.

The following examples show different types of online events where live streaming played a role

Bloomingdale’s Uses Livestreaming To Sell Products

The major US retailer invited Sandra Choi, creative director at Jimmy Choo, to present a 45-minute live stream session in 2021. To encourage immediate sales, the retailer offered a free personalized product for buying. All told, the company has run dozens of live streaming events to engage customers.

Burberry Partners With Twitch For A Live Stream

Promoting a product for immediate purchase is just one way to use a live stream. Luxury fashion brand Burberry streamed a fashion show in 2020 in partnership with Twitch. This event builds on the brand’s commitment to online events – it ran its first online event in 2010.

SAP Connects With B2B Customers With LinkedIn Live

SAP, a multi-billion dollar technology company based in Germany, has successfully used live video to grow its audience. The tech business has run its online show – SAP BTP Better Together: Customer Conversations – for over a year. Season 1 of the live stream show featured interviews with customers like Ferrara, the Gates Corporation, Evernex and others.

Eaton Answers Customer Questions Live

Eaton, a multi-national power management company, is successfully using LinkedIn Live to create live content. The business has created an “Ask the Experts” video series on various topics like career growth and diversity and inclusion. Eaton’s success shows that you don’t need to have celebrities or influences to make your live stream events interesting. Your employees have amazing expertise that is just waiting to be unlocked!

Outside of fashion and retail, live streaming experiences take different forms. For example, many B2B companies use webinars and other online events to connect with their prospects.

There is one challenge associated with focusing more resources on live stream events. Unlike prerecorded videos and webinars, live stream events require more effort. At a minimum, it is helpful to have at least two people – the presenter and the support person – involved in every live stream. Putting in the effort to create an excellent streaming experience, you will find it easier to maintain audience engagement.

Live Stream Engagement: 11 Ways To Get More Viewers

Now you’ve seen how companies are achieving wins with live streaming, it’s time to build your live streaming session. These tips can be used to enhance an existing live stream program or help you launch your first live stream session successfully.

  1. Set Your Marketing Goal For The Livestream 

Planning and executing a successful live stream video experience will take time and resources. Before you commit to those resources, choose a key metric and goal to evaluate the success of your event. For example, you might track the number of orders for the promoted product or the number of leads generated.

  1. Start With What Works With Your Audience

Coming up with amazing content ideas is tough! To save time, review your analytics software to see which content has resonated with your audience in the past. A customer data platform makes it easier to attribute purchases and lead generation to specific content posts. If you don’t have a CDP in place, use other metrics like pageviews, shares, and engagement time to measure what’s working.

  1. Seek Out Product Demonstration Opportunities

As you plan your live stream experience, plan a few ways to show your product. For software, a demo with real data can work well. Even colleges and universities can use demonstrations – use a smartphone and show people around your campus. These product demonstrations can form the core of the live stream in a live shopping event. Or you can add a product demo to the end of a different event.

  1. Invite A Popular Influencer To Join You

There’s a reason why well-known authors and actors are often asked to give keynote talks at conferences – it helps to draw in the crowds. Apply the same principle to your streaming events by inviting an influencer to join you. When you strike the deal with the influencer, invite them to help you promote the event.

  1. Marketing The Live Stream Event Is Critical

Once you’ve chosen a live stream platform, it’s time to promote your event. You can do this by posting on your social media platforms, running paid ads, and sending email sequences to your list.

Give your audience to register for the event by clicking a link and entering email information. Once someone is registered, send them automatic email reminders to be more likely to attend.

By asking your audience to register, you get a clearer idea of how many viewers to expect. It also helps to include an event hashtag on social media. This can increase follower engagement and generate more excitement for your live stream.

  1. Select Your Live Stream Platform

There are two ways you can run a video streaming session: use an existing social platform or set up a branded platform that you control.

Social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch make it easy to start a live broadcast. If your brand already has a significant presence on one of those platforms, it makes sense to stream there. However, there is a downside to relying on a third party. Your audience may become easily distracted by notifications, messages, and other interactions.

To minimize interruptions and distractions, set up your own platform using a tool like Restream lets you broadcast on more than 30 social media platforms simultaneously.

A professional platform also comes with features that help you monetize your live stream, increase audience engagement, and run post-broadcast analytics. If you don’t go with Restream, consider other industry-leading platforms like Vimeo, Dacast or Brightcove.

Vimeo OTT offers a seamless integration with Arena Live Chat. This way you can provide your audience with better engagement experiences during your live events.

  1. Commit To A Livestreaming Schedule 

Your live stream performance may have limited results when you first get started. That’s why a one-off approach to running a live stream is less likely to succeed. Instead, successful streaming strategies tend to commit to an ongoing schedule of streaming. Running a multi-year streaming show like Twitch’s Critical Role is one approach. Alternatively, consider setting up a three or part-event series tied to a specific theme like the holiday shopping season.

  1. Use Incentives, Urgency And Deadlines To Lift Engagement

Urgency is a time-tested principle in sales and marketing. It also applies to growing your live stream engagement. Remember Bloomingdale’s live streaming example from above? The company offered incentives to encourage people to show up at the event and place an order during the event. There are multiple ways to implement this strategy: discounts, limited edition products or offering early access.

  1. Get Inspiration From Other Live Streams

When you focus too much on your live stream engagement metrics, staying creative and fresh gets more difficult. Certainly, measurement matters (we’ll cover it in the next tip). However, engagement also requires ideas and inspiration!

That’s why we’re giving you the performance to spend an afternoon hanging out on live streaming platforms. Ideally, look for streaming shows and episodes that are appealing to a similar audience. If you don’t find any streams like that, look at how entertainment-oriented streamers keep their viewer count high throughout their videos. For example, look at how often live stream content creators interact with their audience via the live chat during their stream. In addition, look at how streamers presented sponsored content and messages to their audience.

Making time to study those who have mastered the art of live stream engagement is one of the best ways to shorten your learning curve.

  1. Level Up Your Audio and Video Equipment

Upgrading the quality of your gear is a smart way to make your live stream come through loud and clear. Tools like the Shure MV88+ Video Kit connect directly to your smartphone for enhanced audio and video quality. It comes with a microphone, tripod, and headphones. You can also stand out with a multi-camera setup by purchasing software like OBS Studio, Wirecast, or VidBlasterX.

  1. Measure And Optimize Your Live Stream

The final way to improve your engagement and conversion numbers over time is to measure each streaming event. Start with the easy to measure metrics like viewer count, activity levels in your live chat and traffic on your website. If your live stream event includes coupons or other trackable calls to action, measure those factors as well. With each live stream you run, taking 15-30 minutes to analyze what worked and what didn’t will gradually lift your engagement numbers over time.

The One App That Lifts Live Stream Engagement Every Time

Your live stream events should be a two-way street. You present and your audience raises questions and gives you feedback. That’s why adding Live Chat to your website is so important. Arena Live Chat only takes a few minutes to install and set up.

3 Ways To Grow Revenue With Customer Data

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The Metaverse is an exciting new development for marketers and brands. Creating immersive experiences and mixed reality experiences on metaverse platforms means a greater opportunity to deliver a personalized experience to customers. 

In the short term, the metaverse customer experience will likely require a virtual showroom, a virtual reality headset, and other resources to create a compelling digital realm. Right now, online games are dominating this type of Internet experience but that will change over time. Arena has this great article with tips to set you up for the metaverse.

Three Ways To Grow Revenue With A Metaverse Concept

Before investing significant resources in interactive content and virtual environments, let’s get clear on the business value of the metaverse. This type of virtual space is at an early stage of development but business leaders have already found a few opportunities.

1. Entertainment

Online games and extended reality – remember the Pokemon Go craze of 2016? – are the first way brands can earn revenue from digital reality. For example, gaming technology companies are already working on creating entertainment experiences for online avatars. Gaming isn’t right for every brand, however.

2. Sell Digital Products

Creating a highly entertaining consumer experience isn’t your only option. You can also offer digital products like non-fungible tokens (NFTs). For example, imagine creating exclusive NFTs and other virtual products to celebrate a product launch. 

3. Augment Your Marketing Strategies

Immediate revenue generation may not be your primary focus. Instead, you can use the digital environment to grow customer loyalty or better understand your prospects. Increasingly, concerns over privacy rights mean brands have to work harder to convince brands to share data. Offering a novel experience, even a straightforward virtual mall, is a powerful way to get started.

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In the rest of this post, we’ll focus on the third strategy – using the metaverse to boost your marketing strategies – since that approach is relevant to most brands.

Why Do You Need A CDP In The Metaverse?

There is a lot of hype around metaverse technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and virtual worlds. Video game and entertainment companies are early adopters of the Metaverse because there is an easy fit with their business model. If you’re not in the entertainment business, the metaverse is still relevant as a way to enhance your marketing.

Driving business results from the metaverse becomes far easier when you use a Customer Data Platform (CDP). There is no simple way to track which customers and prospects engage with metaverse content without it. 

Integrating a metaverse concept with your customer data platform is the best way to go. In this situation, you can track user activity from your website, the metaverse, and elsewhere. You’re able to measure what kind of people find your metaverse content engaging. Most importantly, you get faster feedback on user behavior. That means you can iterate and optimize your metaverse experiences faster and reach your return on investment goals.

Attaining a profitable metaverse experience starts with creating the proper foundation. Before you purchase virtual reality hardware or consulting, set up your customer data platform foundation first.

Preparing For A Profitable Metaverse Experience

Use these tips to get ready for the Metaverse. The first few steps of the plan do not directly involve the Metaverse by design. Jumping into a metaverse experience without first establishing a foundation is a recipe for wasting time and money.

1. Review Your Marketing Goals and Key Performance Indicators

Start with your marketing goals and KPIs in mind before everything else. Your goals will likely include the following:

  • Lead Generation. You may have a defined KPI like the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), email subscribers, app installs, or free trial sign-ups.
  • Audience Growth and Engagement. For most companies, this goal indirectly contributes to lead generation.
  • Sales. Ecommerce companies may be focused on metrics like average order value and customer lifetime value.

Once you have your goals in mind, let’s look at how your customer data supports those goals.

2. Assess Your Customer Data

There are three dimensions to assess your current customer data: quantity, quality, and utility. By optimizing all of these factors, you can grow faster.

  • Customer Data Quantity. Count the number of customer profiles you have in your databases. Ensure you check all of your tools and apps like email, customer relationship management, and live chat.
  • Customer Data Quality. The quality of your customer data also matters. For example, do you have processes to test the data? Remove duplicates and errors? Without quality control, it won’t be easy to run effective campaigns.
  • Customer Data Utility. This dimension refers to the capacity of your organization to use customer data to achieve your goals. Using Arena CDP, you can see your customer data from multiple sources in a single place, making the data much more valuable.

3. Analyze Your Content and Engagement

Engaging content and ideas are crucial to achieving success in the Metaverse. You can save time in the content creation process by reviewing your current performance. Use the following techniques to identify high-performing content.

  • Website Analytics. Check which content has the most page views and user engagement. Based on these insights, you can come up with ideas for metaverse experiences.
  • Customer Feedback. Survey customers about which content they are most interested in.
  • Social Media Analytics. Measure the number of likes, comments, and other engagement factors on your main social media accounts.

From the above sources, you should be able to come up with at least 5-10 ideas that can inform your approach to the Metaverse.

4. Set Up A Customer Data Platform On Your Website

The next step is to set up a customer data platform on your website. Leveraging Arena Personas makes it easy to create a single customer profile that covers Google Analytics, Facebook, chat, mobile and other platforms. Adding it to your CDP will lay a good foundation for your metaverse marketing program.

5. Add Live Chat To Your Website

Once your customer data platform is fully set up, it is crucial to make your website more interactive. To achieve that goal, consider installing Arena Live Chat. Live Chat is valuable because it makes it easier for customers to ask questions and get answers fast. Most users can install Arena Live Chat in 5-10 minutes.

6. Test Metaverse Content Ideas Through Virtual Events

At this point, you are ready to start your metaverse experience planning process. You have a strong marketing foundation in place. In addition, going through step 3 should have given a few ideas of the kinds of content your customers are most interested in.

Now, start planning a virtual event experience with metaverse technologies. To inspire your approach, seek inspiration from these events in the metaverse.

  • Augmented World Expo USA (June 2022). With 5,000 attendees, this event explores the metaverse from several angles. Look into the event’s speakers to see some of the newest trends.
  • Metaverse Global Congress (June 2022). Based in San Jose, the Congress event covers experiential marketing, monetization, and training topics. The Congress event also includes events aimed at metaverse beginners.

7. Create A Metaverse Pilot Project

Now you are ready to start preparing metaverse pilot project ideas. Most companies find it easier to enter the Metaverse on an event basis. That is the approach that we recommend as well. Designing a metaverse experience that runs for a few hours to a few days is much more manageable.

8. Enhance The Conference Experience.

You may already be planning an event or company conference. In that case, look for ways to bring some of your panels or discussions into the metaverse context.

9. Experiment With Gaming Style Experiences

Gaming companies have the most experience in creating metaverse experiences. Therefore, creating a branded game could be a simple way to get started. For example, a homeware company might work with; The Knights of Unity to create a branded experience. The company has created a virtual world where users can buy, build and decorate homes.

10. Experiment With Exclusive Products

Earlier, we mentioned the example of Gucci selling exclusive products through the Metaverse. If your company has a new product release planned, launching the product through a metaverse world might help to generate additional excitement.

Once you have selected your metaverse idea, you can move ahead to launch the event.

11. Run The Event

Thoroughly planning a metaverse event goes beyond the scope of this post. Instead, we are going to focus on the marketing implications. Before, during, and after the event, users should have multiple opportunities to visit your website, ask for more information and make purchases. All of this activity should be tracked through your customer data platform so that you can follow up afterward.

In addition, your customers may need additional support because the Metaverse is still relatively new. For example, customers may have difficulties using virtual reality hardware. In this case, providing technical support on your website with Arena Live Chat is smart. Otherwise, confused customers may give up and leave your event if they cannot get the support they need.

12. Evaluate The Metaverse Event With Your Customer Data Platform

Finally, take some time to evaluate the metaverse event using your customer data platform. Refer back to the marketing goals and key performance indicators you outlined in step one of this process. If you did not generate new leads or sales, you have achieved other benefits like increased loyalty.

Lay Your Metaverse Foundation With Arena Personas Today

Whether you join the Metaverse today or in a few years, it is vital to act now to prepare for the event. Arena Personas helps you to create data-driven user profiles so that you can fine-tune your CDP towards marketing.

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Future of Cookies In Marketing: Strategies That Work

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Prepare for the cookieless future. User privacy concerns have prompted the advertising industry, Apple, and Google to develop new marketing strategies. New privacy laws make the conventional approach to personalized advertising no longer work. 

To succeed, advertisers need to meet new consumer expectations and regulatory restrictions by creating direct connections with their audiences. Success in a world without third-party cookies starts with understanding how the world has changed.

New Opportunities In The Digital Landscape Changed

The future of cookies will take two primary forms: cohort-based marketing and first-party relationships. These opportunities deserve a prominent place in any effective marketing strategy today.

The Rise of Cohort Based Marketing: Not Ready For Prime Time 

Rather than tracking each user’s online behaviors, the new approach pioneered by Google and adtech companies is cohort-based advertising. This means aiming your advertising at a group of people with similar interests instead of a single user. One example of this trend is the federated learning of cohorts (FLoC) that Google has pioneered. This concept is exciting because it will leverage machine learning to enhance digital advertising.

The FLoC concept was initially developed in 2021 in a privacy sandbox created by Google. This particular technology came to an end in January 2022. There are some ongoing consumer privacy concerns with the approach taken at Google. As a result, the company is moving in a new direction called “Google Topics” (or Topics API). 

It’s not just privacy concerns that cause difficulties for cohort-based marketing. Fundamentally, tracking a large group of people may not be a good match for the customer journey you have developed.   

First-Party Relationship: The New Way To Understand Consumer Behavior

Also known as a first-person cookie, this marketing approach is exciting. A first-party cookie is direct rather than relying on third-party cookie data from others in the marketing industry. For example, a potential customer lands on your website and accepts browser notifications or signs up for your email list. 

Companies can target relevant advertising directly to their potential customers with this direct connection. Using your Customer Data Platform and Google Analytics, you might notice that one user is regularly visiting your “on-sale” pages. Based on that information, you can tailor marketing to that individual user. For example, send them more emails or notifications emphasizing your seasonal sales. In essence, establishing a robust first-party relationship means personalized messaging becomes much more manageable. A deep understanding of what your customers want means you can improve your emails, Google Ads, and other marketing campaigns much faster.

How To Succeed With First Party Cookies

Thriving in a 1st party relationship world requires solving two problems: the need for more website traffic and user consent.

1) Increase Website Traffic

First, this strategy requires potential customers to come to your website. That is getting harder today because many popular websites and tech companies operate as walled gardens. These walled gardens maximize user time on their website rather than sending people elsewhere. 

2) Renewed Focus on Earning Consumer Consent

The second challenge is that privacy standards require you to seek consent to establish a direct relationship with a user. The adtech industry has previously played fast and loose with the privacy rules. Also, privacy regulations like GDPR have pushed companies to change their advertising strategies. It’s not just regulations either – companies like Apple have pushed back hard against invasive tracking methods. As a result, third-party data like traditional cookies are largely becoming obsolete.

Gaining consumer consent in this brave new world requires offering something attractive to users. There are different approaches to gaining consumer consent to individual user tracking. Common solutions include promising users a personalized experience, offering a discount (i.e. a discount code) or a free resource like an exclusive webinar or report.

Audience Engagement: A New Hope For Marketing

The future of cookies is fundamentally focused on creating and deepening direct relationships. Your online presence has to become more exciting and appealing to your potential customers. Your online content, events, and experiences have to be so appealing that your audience happily agrees to receive marketing messages from you.

Three Strategies To Grow And Deepen First Party Relationships

Use the following strategies to keep users returning to your website week after week, even as the digital landscape changes. By the way, offering engaging content and experiences has a secondary marketing benefit. You’re giving your users more chances to share your content with other people. 

1. Boost Investment In Content Marketing and Online Events

To keep people coming back to your website repeatedly, appealing products and services are not enough. Your marketing itself needs to add value like original data, a community of like minded people and exciting content.

So, what exactly does a boosted effort in content marketing look like? According to the Content Marketing Institute, more than half of B2B marketers have increased their spending on video, events (including digital and hybrid), owned media assets (i.e., content you own and control), and paid media.

As third party cookies decline, it’s wise to take inspiration from a variety of brands who are achieving wins in content marketing. 

  • Salesforce offers a wide range of content marketing initiatives like podcasts (e.g. the Marketing Cloudcast and the Marketing Trends podcast), events (i.e. the Dreamforce conference has attracted tens of thousands of attendees) and much more.
  • Dropbox shows that interactive approaches to content marketing can become wildly successful. A few years ago, Dropbox created a “What kind of marketer are you?” quiz to create awareness – a campaign that attracted significant leads.
  • PayPal, the well known financial technology firm, shows a simple way to create content marketing: work with your users. PayPal Stories have recently featured a variety of successful small business owners and entrepreneurs. This PayPal approach to content marketing shows that you can make customers the star of your content marketing. 

Investing more deeply in content marketing matters because it gives your customers a reason to keep coming back to your website.  When customers are motivated to visit your site regularly, you have more opportunities to ask for their consent to market to them through their browser, email, and other means.

2. Grow Your Social Media Audiences

The best way to be ready for the end of cookies is to drive the audience to your own website. This way, you can generate proprietary, first-party data about your audience. Attracting your audience from social media is worthwhile because these audiences have already shown interest in your brand.

Since there are many social media platforms, there are two simple techniques to decide which platform to focus on. Start with your customers – what social media platforms do they like the most? Running a survey of your customers to ask them about their favorite social media sites can help to guide you.

Further, you also want to think about which platforms have sufficient reach and advertising opportunities. For example, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have a significant market share and interesting significant advertising features. Building a following on those platforms is another way to grow despite the uncertain future of cookies.

3. Build Your Customer Data Platform

Simply increasing the number of website visitors and subscribers is not enough to succeed in a cookie-less future. It’s vital to deepen your understanding of consumer behavior.

Implementing a Customer Data Platform is a significant next step. A CDP connects to your existing apps and platforms like your email marketing software, Google Analytics, and CRM. Drawing together multiple sources, it can help you understand the content and experiences that your customers engage in before buying. 

Once you have a CDP in place, use to understand the customer journey in detail. Look at how many touchpoints a potential customer has with your brand before they buy. For example, you might see that high value buyers attend events like live shopping and download a few specific types of content.

As a result, you can quickly refresh your advertising strategies monthly based on the specific patterns your users are engaged in.

What To Do This Month To Thrive Without Traditional Cookies 

Choosing the right marketing strategy matters, but your team also needs to know what exactly to do this week and this month to succeed. Use these tactics to win in today’s marketing game without focusing on third-party cookies. 

1. Integrated Email Marketing Analytics

The emergence of new marketing opportunities like the metaverse is exciting. Positioning your brand to win in these emerging areas can pay off long-term. However, you also need to keep your eye on this quarter’s results. 

Optimizing your email marketing effectiveness remains one of the best ways to drive higher returns. For example, check if your email marketing software supports A/B testing on subject lines, links and other elements. This approach lets you achieve individual user tracking through email.

Logging into your email platform and reviewing its trends on open rates, clicks and replies only give you part of the picture. It is also vital to know whether a subscriber has attended an online event or engaged with your sales team. Arena’s CDP platform makes it easy to connect the dots between email marketing data and other customer interactions.

2. Boost Push Notification Marketing

While email marketing has exceptional ROI, it is not the only opt-in digital marketing option. With push notifications, you ask the customer for permission to send messages to them directly through the browser or mobile apps.

According to Airship research, opt-in rates for mobile app push notifications range from 29% to more than 70%! To earn high opt-in rates from your prospects, keep investing in engaging content and virtual events. When prospects enjoy your content and experiences, they will happily opt in to receive more information from you.

3. Review Your Privacy Policy

Customer expectations for privacy and data protection are increasing every year. As marketers pivot away from cookies, your privacy policy needs to keep up. There are several layers to updating your privacy policy for the post cookie era.

Start by reviewing your privacy policy to see if it reflects the customer data you are currently collecting. If your privacy policy was last updated over a year ago, it might be out of date. For example, adopting a customer data platform to build a comprehensive customer profile may require an update to your privacy policy because you are changing how you use data.

Next, take a hard look at your security safeguards. You probably have robust systems to protect highly sensitive data like payment data. However, your marketing databases also contain personal information, ensuring that data is protected.

The New Way To Achieve Personalized Marketing 

Cookies were powerful because they unlocked personalization for digital marketers. As we say goodbye to cookies as a central strategy, how can you keep data-driven personalization?

The answer lies in setting up a customer data platform for your brand. It’s more than data dashboards and exciting reports. A customer data platform is one of the best ways to identify advocates and passionate fans in your audience. With a CDP, your marketing team can also learn which marketing assets are driving your results.

Discover how a customer data platform can solve today’s most pressing problems in marketing. Download Arena’s CDP Ebook: The Future of Marketing and Sales. Your marketing personas will be grounded in factual data with a CDP in place.

The Ultimate Content Wall Guide

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A content wall is a powerful way to attract online visitors and keep them on your website for minutes. Best of all, you can create a content wall fast by leveraging social media and post updates. To create your next Content Wall, use this ultimate guide to engage your audience!

What Is A Content Wall?

A content wall is a digital hub where you present curated content to your audience in various formats. Also known as social walls or social media walls, a content wall can combine posts from your community and your staff. For example, your social walls might feature Instagram posts from customers, videos from your YouTube channel, and blog posts. Publishers, companies, and educators can use content walls to engage their communities.  

A content wall is distinct from your blog in a few ways. A blog is often structured with posts in reverse chronological order (i.e., the newest posts are displayed first). On the other hand, a content wall is a curated experience typically focused on a single theme like a specific conference.

In brief, content walls present and package content from multiple sources and make it easy for your audience to consume this information. 

Five Reasons Why Companies Are Using Content Walls 

There are five reasons why more companies invest in curating and presenting content walls.

1. Enhance their positioning 

Selecting blog posts, videos, images, and other material for your content wall takes significant effort. When a company develops a reputation for selecting the best content on a given subject, you will draw in more traffic and be perceived as an expert authority in your field.

2. Increase revenue from your audience

Giving your audience a good reason to stay on your website for more extended periods of time is a crucial benefit of content walls. When a customer spends several minutes or longer on your website, you can display more ads and generate more revenue. Further, you can also present more calls to action (e.g., sign up here to get notified of our monthly content wall series)

3. Aligning the marketing and editorial sides of your business

Publishing companies sometimes struggle to bring together their editorial content and marketing communications. A social wall can help! Your editorial team starts the process by selecting the best content around a given theme (e.g., the very best photojournalism showing your city). The marketing team can then step in to organize and structure the content to make it more engaging. 

4. Decreasing reliance on social media websites

Relying on social media sites to bring traffic to your business puts your growth at risk. What happens when ad costs go up? Or if these companies change their algorithms to make it harder to bring traffic in? Over the years, one thing has become clear. Social media sites want users to stay on their sites rather than leave.

Your goal is different – you want people to come to your website after discovering you on social media. 

There’s a solution to this challenge – add highly engaging content experiences to your website. What do the most popular social media websites have in common? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram all present feeds to their users. Creating a content wall of highly curated content gives your audience a reason to experience a sense of community right on your website!

5. Increase audience loyalty

Allowing your audience to discover new ideas and insights on your website is powerful. In a way, your audience will start to experience a sense of adventure by visiting your content walls. That means your audience will keep coming back to see more content. Over time, your audience is likely to trust you more, which means that it is easier for them to download content, ask for information and make purchases.

Adding content walls to your business is even greater for publishers.

Content Wall Publishers & Media: 6 Ways To Grow And Stand Out

Publishers are in the business of creating exciting, informative content for their audience. Today’s publishers create articles, blog posts, social posts, live streams, videos, and live chat experiences. 

You can draw even more value from these assets by presenting them as content walls. These curated experiences are valuable because they are organized in focused themes that speak to the audience’s interests. This means you’ll be positioned to compete with today’s most engaging online services like Netflix, Disney+, and social media sites.

Now, let’s explore how content walls can help publishers attract readers and subscribers and deepen those relationships effectively. 

1. Positioning your company as an authority in your industry

Fake news and misinformation are major social problems today. So becoming a trusted source has become even more important recently. The Pew Research Center has found that a personal connection to a journalist or news organization can increase trust. 

One way to develop and strengthen that trusted relationship is to create high-quality content walls. Thoughtfully creating a content wall with the very best content on a topic positions your company as trustworthy. This is a great place to highlight how much work your staff put in. 

For example, you might point out that your journalists evaluated over 500 sources before picking the 20 best sources for technology stock insights. In essence, you’ve saved your audience the trouble of sifting through endless sources to find quality data and insights.

By regularly presenting curated content walls to your audience, your audience will increasingly view your website as the best place to find high-quality information.

2. Increase your visibility and discoverability in search engines

It’s not enough to be a trusted authority anymore. You also need a consistent, reliable way to attract new people to your properties.

Fortunately, content walls can play a crucial role in helping you grow your audience through SEO (search engine optimization).  Content walls give users significant content about a single topic from several perspectives. Search engines, including Google, increasingly value authoritative websites that authoritatively present content when determining rankings. 

In other words, content walls can drive more organic visitors to your site!

3. Gain more control over your content 

Once you publish a new article, post, or video on the Internet, it can spread wildfire. Alas, there’s a downside to the ease of spreading information. It’s far too easy for unscrupulous people and companies to copy and monetize YOUR content without permission. That means lost revenue and online visitors for your publication.

Content walls offer one solution to the challenge of online plagiarism. Content walls make it easy for publishers to control how their content is displayed to readers. For example, you can make it more difficult for people to copy and paste content and spread it without your knowledge or consent.

From an editorial point of view, increased control is helpful in another way. You can tailor the audience’s experience based on your expertise. You can present trigger warnings, background information, and more information to make your content more meaningful.

4. Generate more paying subscribers  

Did you know that the New York Times has about 8 million paid digital subscribers? Those subscribers are helpful for the company to thrive in the digital age.

It’s no longer enough to generate millions of page views and attract online visitors to your website. You also need to convert those visitors into subscribers. Limiting some of your best content walls to paying subscribers only will make signing up for a paid subscription much more valuable. 

5. Understand your audience more deeply 

There’s an art and science behind creating a successful publishing experience. In many cases, publishers do not fully understand what their audiences value. 

Content walls can help you understand your audience better in two ways. 

Content Wall engagement

You’ll get this benefit when you create several content walls over time. Pay attention to how your audience interacts with each content wall you create. Which videos or images do they like? See which content drives people to share your content wall on social media. These insights will help you see the themes and approaches your audience likes the most.

With these insights in hand, you can create content that immediately connects with your audience in the future.

Gain more insights with your customer data platform

Content walls are mighty because they give people a reason to visit your website and interact with it deeply. If you install a customer data platform, you’ll be able to quickly understand the exact profile of your most engaged viewers. That means you can more accurately target your marketing efforts in the future.

6. Hit your marketing metrics goals 

Most publishers have demanding marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) to meet each month. You might be focused on:

  • Monthly unique visitors
  • Increasing your clickthrough rate (CTR)
  • Growing your email list

A content wall can help you hit all of these goals more quickly. As website visitors see the quality of your content wall, they are more likely to like and trust your brand over time. That means more people giving you the benefit of the doubt when you offer a new call to action (e.g., sign up for our next live chat event). A content wall also adds to your sense of community – it’s something remarkable to share with other people. 

Demonstrating that your publication is pulling in a large and growing audience also means that your advertising revenue will keep growing. 

What types of content work best in a content wall?

When you first get started with a content wall, getting overwhelmed is easy. There are many different kinds of content you could feature – articles, e-books, how-to guides, videos, embedded social feeds, links to webinars, podcasts, etc. 

How exactly do you craft an engaging content wall for your audience with so many types of content to choose from? There are a few guiding principles we recommend.

Start with a theme

Choosing a the right idea is the first and most crucial step in the content wall planning process. 

If your company is hosting a major conference, the Content Wall could focus on that event. A publisher might choose to create a content wall around a major news event like an election.

It’s essential to select a theme your audience is already interested in and one that fits your company’s goals. If you have too many content wall ideas, choose an idea where you already have a significant body of in-house content to draw on.

Create a foundation of in-house content

Your organization’s content is an excellent foundation for a content wall. Let’s say your theme is cybersecurity innovation. Pick a few articles, videos, and other posts on cybersecurity that have performed well in the past year on your website and put those on your content wall.

Enrich your Content Wall with third-party sources

Your next opportunity is to go out and find the best third-party content relevant to your theme. Start with publications that are already well respected by your audience. For example, a business-themed content wall might draw on the Wall St Journal and Harvard Business Review. 

It is best to present short quotes from third-party sources and link back to the source. You don’t want your content wall to cause any copyright infringement headaches!

Add user generated content 

Pulling in a few social media posts from current customers is an intelligent way to show appreciation for your customers. Ask permission before copying somebody’s else content and putting it on your content wall.

Consider relevant ads  

Publishers, take note! You can include relevant ads on your content walls. These ads should be relevant to the content wall. For example, your staff might have created a special report about the future of cryptocurrency recently. Your content wall is about blockchain or cryptocurrency topics, including a few ads for the particular report makes sense.

Keep in mind that the best content walls are customer-centric by nature. Therefore, advertising and self-promoting content should be kept to a minimum.  Ultimately, a content wall or content hub is a way of growing awareness and trust in your brand.

Content Wall Examples

What if you’re still not quite sure what a content wall is? Look at these examples in different niches and discuss them with your team as you plan your content wall.

SportsNet Celebrates Black History Month

The SportsNet content wall effectively connects their core coverage – sports – to Black History Month. Notice how the publisher presents each part of their content wall with a small photo, headline and copy. This is a great example of a content wall that combines content from the publisher and social media updates.

The PPA Festival Social Wall

The Professional Publishers Association (PPA) recently used a social wall to boost awareness of their annual conference. The PPA Festival approach primarily focused on Twitter. Featuring updates from social media is a good approach when your audience is actively engaged and posting about your event.

Content wall core features

A good idea for your content wall is the spark that will drive engagement. However, a robust content management platform is essential to keeping your content wall organized. As you consider the different content walls on the market, look for these critical features.

Get more SEO traffic with keywords 

The best content wall platforms are designed with SEO goals in mind. Look for a platform that supports your organic traffic growth goals.

Customize the look and feel of your content wall

The content wall should match the colors and design of the rest of your online presence. It is crucial to select a content wall that lets you control its visual appearance so that you can offer a compelling appearance.

Flexibility to add new content walls

Your content wall should make it easy to publish new content walls (or update existing ones) easily. 

Create and send content wall updates 

Your users might get busy and forget to come back to your website to see your latest content wall. Choose a platform that lets your users subscribe to receive new updates by email to keep your audience engaged.

Add recommendations to explore other content

Deeply exploring a content wall might not interest all of your audience. Therefore, your content wall should make it possible to add suggestions to other content on your website like ebooks, webinars, videos, interviews, and other content.

Make social sharing easy

The best content wall apps do not rely exclusively on SEO to attract new visitors: they also support social media sharing. Look for an app that includes easy sharing with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

If you’re unsure which content wall platform to use, why not try Arena’s Live Blog? 

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How Live Chat can Help Agencies and their Clients

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If you’re looking for a way to help clients improve engagement, increase sales, enhance customer support, and more, consider adding a live chat tool. Live chats tools are easy to set up, and they offer several benefits to both companies and customers. This guide was created to help digital agencies understand how live chat websites can benefit their clients. 

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is a messaging technology that lets users interact with your company and other users via a website chat widget. One study by Software Advice Inc. predicts that more than 85% of businesses will offer live chat by 2022. 

Live chats can be initiated by the company or the user, and company responses can be automated or answered by staff members. Digital agencies can create a live chat website for their clients to engage their audience and improve customer service.

How Digital Agencies can use Live Chat

By creating a chat website, digital agencies can improve engagement, enhance customer service, increase profits, and understand their audience. 

Improve Engagement

Digital agencies can create a live chat website that encourages users to interact with each other and the company. By giving users more ways and incentives to participate in conversations, they are more likely to stay on your clients’ websites. A website chat widget can be added to both a chat website or a live broadcast. 

For example, adding a group live chat during a live sporting broadcast encourages users to share their opinions and interact with each other on your chat. You can also incentivize users to comment by offering prizes, coupons, and product discounts. Fashion brands, like Vans, offer live music streaming DJ sets, aided by Live Chat in their website, to attract and retain users.

Agencies can add a dedicated Q&A that lets users ask relevant questions. Companies can add live chat polls to encourage user feedback and gain valuable insights on their preferences. They can also add call-to-action buttons that include pictures and product descriptions to maximize conversion. 

If improving engagement through group live chat, conversion cards, and Q&As sounds right for you, consider adding a tool like Arena Live Chat. Arena Live Chat is a comprehensive live chat tool that has provided customers with a 28% increase in subscription conversion, 40% reduction in marketing spend, and 64% increase in user engagement. 

For maximum results, pair Arena Live Chat with its Live Blog solution. A live blog can share instant updates on relevant events and can be used to encourage user interaction via live chat. 

Enhance Customer Service

Many website chat widgets specialize in customer service. By building a live chat website for clients, you can ensure their customers are well informed about their products and services. One study shows that live chat has the highest customer satisfaction level at 73%, followed by 61% for email support and 44% for phone support. 

Live chat increases the speed and efficiency of customer support. For example, an AI-powered chatbot can instantly respond to customer questions by sending push links, product information, and website navigation help. You can also let users chat with a staff member and allow agents to take the chatbot’s place. 

Increase Profits

Live chat can increase your client’s profits by boosting sales and reducing expenses. 

Live chat reduces friction in the sales process. One study shows that customers are 2.8 times more likely to make a purchase after engaging with a live chat agent. 

Without live chat, customers typically need to fill out a form to be later contacted via phone or email. With live chat, customers can connect to company sales teams instantly. 

Agents and chatbots can quickly handle objections and streamline the checkout process via live chat. They can provide free resources like tip sheets, PDF guides, and videos to inform customers. They can also address last-minute concerns on checkout pages. 

Live chat also reduces support costs. One study found that live chat customer support is 17% to 30% cheaper than phone support. 

With phone support, agents can only attend to one customer at a time. Live chat agents can multi-task by having three or more chat windows open at once. This allows them to provide more support in less time. 

Understand Your Audience

When paired with a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) tool, live chat is an effective way to understand your audience without questioning them directly. 

Companies can look through user chat histories to identify pain points, interests, and engagement levels. From there, they can create a customer profile that shows which chat rooms users engage in, how much revenue they’ve generated, and new products they may be interested in. 

Some advanced tools can analyze user conversations to determine their views and feelings on certain products and brands. This allows company agents to have personalized interactions with customers based on these viewpoints. Consider connecting Arena CDP to your live chat to better understand customer behavior. 

You can also take a direct approach when gathering customer information. By including questions like “How many employees does your company have?” in your live chat script, you can better understand the customer and connect them to the appropriate agent. 

Conclusion

Digital agencies can use this guide to determine how to use live chat to help their clients. Live chat tools like Arena Live Chat can be set up to allow users and companies to quickly interact with each other.

Live chat improves engagement on websites and live events, and support agents can use it to enhance customer service. Live chat also increases profits by boosting sales and reducing support costs. These tools can also be paired with CDPs and CRMs to better understand audiences and create user profiles. 

The best Live Chat for business: a definitive guide

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Companies are continually battling to improve their audience engagement and offer more dynamic experiences for their customers. As a result, Live Chat solutions have increasingly been used to strengthen the relationship between customers and brands.

Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to send messages to each other, answer polls, ask questions, and interact with a company while browsing products and viewing content. 

Traditionally used to enhance the customer support experience, Live Chat has grown into something much more. Live Chat can also be used to enhance audience engagement by letting users interact in real-time, partake in relevant conversations, and share their opinions. 

When used for customer support, Live Chat quickly connects customers to support agents. But seeing the need for more user interaction, the role of Live Chat changed.

The community effect is more than conceptual, it is present live, at the time of purchase. Engagement with the public allows for better interaction between users and companies.

Today, Live Chat is used strategically to increase audience engagement. Companies can even set up live group chat rooms and create a community on their website, leading to a more favorable shopping experience.

Use cases for Live Chat:

The top criteria for selecting the best Live Chat Tool

Ok, so you have decided that it’s time to adopt a Live Chat solution to increase audience engagement, support your service or content operation, and of course, help and delight your customers. There are dozens of software options in the market, so how can you choose what best suits your business needs?

Different Live Chat tools come with varying options of setting and functionalities, so you should be aware of key existing features and best practices for Live Chat to make a more assertive choice. 

People are used to having hybrid conversations on a daily basis and sending pictures and videos all the time to their friends and family. So why should communication with brands and other users be any different?

By choosing the right Live Chat software, you’ll let customers seamlessly interact with each other and your company like never before. Absorbing these formats makes interactions more fluid and can help resolve requests faster since customers can send pictures related to products and services.

We have prepared a list of features to consider when choosing a Live Chat solution for your company. Check it out:

1) Direct Messaging

All Live Chat software should have a direct messaging feature. This lets users share their ideas about trending topics, live streaming, and live events. It also gives your brand a way to build relationships with customers. 

2) Social Features

Some Live Chat solutions offer GIFs, reactions, emojis and social features such as “like” buttons, which make the conversation more fun by simulating social networks. They can be great for companies that want to create a more personalized Live Chat experience. 

3) Group Live Chat

Companies that organize live events, conferences, and live transmissions should consider Live Group Chat as a channel to bring together the audience – where they can discuss your content in a real-time forum. 

Live Group Chat gives companies more ownership of their audience while allowing people to chat in their channels instead of social media, for example. Ultimately, it can boost engagement and time spent on your website. Brans like Vans, for instance, use Arena Live Chat to retain users longer in their website.

To organize the conversations, it’s helpful to find a tool that can categorize topics into separate channels. Find a Live Chat tool that can integrate with your broadcast or live stream event. 

4) Advanced Tools

Some Live Chat tools include advanced features for engaging your audience and making sales. 

To increase conversion rates, a conversion cards feature lets you add several calls to action in your chats. These can include product photos, pricing details, or sign-up links. 

Other features like polls allow you to gather user data and understand their viewpoint. Simply ask a question, create a few preset answers, and see which one generates the best results. 

A dedicated Q&A tool encourages users to ask questions and lets you answer them. This will encourage more user interaction and can keep users on your Live Chat longer. 

5) Integrations with third-party business software

Messaging app integration is one thing, but even more importantly, you should look for solutions that integrate into your business and analytics software. 

Live Chat tools don’t just work on their own, they offer better results when integrated to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Customer Management Systems (CMS), and sales automation software, for instance.

Such integrations allow you to have a unified view of the customer and manage leads without leaving the chat interface – checking information about customers’ profile and sales records. 

6) Mobile app integration

Many companies bet on Live Chat only for websites. According to a study pulled from Google Analytics’ Benchmarking Feature, 68.1% of global website traffic in 2020 came from mobile users. 

Among the benefits of mobile app integration is the possibility to track customers on the go with geo-localization tools, for example, and better understand their mobile behavior. 

7) Pricing

Another major factor is pricing. Some tools might seem super complete, but their pricing is impractical depending on the size and scope of your business. Analyzing key engagement metrics and the aspects you wish to improve is a great way to understand your needs and find a tool with compatible pricing.

8) Analytics Tools

A good pack of Live Chat essential features also include analytics integration and monitoring of visitor details, average time spent on sessions, chat history, etc. Some platforms even allow you to generate reports on the sales that were assisted by chat, which helps in monitoring and improving customer care strategies. 

9) Brand Customization

It is important that the Live Chat you choose has good customization options. Just like other touchpoints with the customer, Live Chat should be consistent with your brand’s identity and color palette, so make sure you pick a solution that offers enough widgets to give your chat the right look.

10) Scalable Chat

For enterprise businesses and companies that want to offer massive Live Group Chat sessions, like publishers and live events companies, it’s important to have scale. If you want to gather multiple people in a chat session, you should choose a solution that can handle chatrooms with sometimes hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

11) Security

One of the most important aspects to check with Live Chat vendors is security. Does the Live Chat have an active firewall and data backup? What are the infrastructure and privacy policies like? Are security issues related to the chat handled in house or by the vendor?

You should always make a risk analysis regarding data breaches and cyber-attacks before purchasing any software, and it wouldn’t be any different when purchasing a Live Chat tool.  

12) Spam Control and Shadow Banning

Live Chat is about being customer-centric, engaging customers, and helping solve their doubts, but it is not free of spams and abusive messages. Especially when it comes to open Live Group Chats, like the ones used by publishers and live broadcasters, it is vital to have a solution that automatically spots and bans spam and flooding messages.

13) Integrations with messaging apps

Some Live Chat solutions offer integrations with messaging apps beyond your website, like with messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other social media messaging apps.

By integrating other communication channels into Live Chat, it’s easier to deliver contextual support without the customer having to move across different platforms and making the same requests repeatedly. 

A study from Aberdeen Group shows that companies can retain 89% of their customers by offering consistent service quality across multiple channels, while companies that don’t do that have only a 33% retention rate.

14) Cloud or on-premise deployment

Your company should also decide if the Live Chat system will be cloud-hosted (on a third party server) or installed on-premise (a dedicated server maintained by your IT department). 

Cloud-hosted systems are more friendly and flexible to the operations team. However, if you want to keep all data and information within your company, then you can choose an on-premise deployment. 

15. Level of proactivity

A Live Chat tool can be reactive, a window that is just there waiting for visitors to click on it. Or, it can offer settings for proactive communication, such as automated personalized messages to engage users in different moments. 

Even though it’s interesting to have Live Chat as a non-intrusive channel for the customer, you should have the option to personalize messages in the chat window according to visitors’ navigation patterns and behavioral indicators. 

Want to test Live Chat on your business?

If you want to test Live Chat Solutions, Arena has one of the most complete options on the market, and the best thing is that you can try it for free!