Category Archives: E-Commerce

8 Must-Have AI Tools For Shopify Stores

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Running a successful Shopify store takes a lot of work: product creation, shipping, marketing, security, and more. The good news is that AI tools have arrived to make life easier for Shopify store owners. Take one of these AI apps for a test drive and see if it meets your needs.

The Top 8 Must-Have AI Tools For Shopify

1) CreatorKit

  • Free Trial Available: there is a free plan available (subject to usage and feature limitations)
  • Notable Features and Integrations: Shopify integration, background creation, and removal.

Presenting your products with the right photos and videos is essential to lifting conversions. CreatorKit is an AI-powered tool that makes it easier to create photos and videos. The app, released in 2021, also includes multiple templates to create images faster.

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While focused on Shopify, CreatorKit images suit social media platforms like TikTok. Paid plans include real-time chat support for customers, while the free plan offers email-only support.

2) Octane AI: Advanced Quiz Maker

  • Free Trial Available: A free trial and three pricing plans are available. The higher tier plans allow you to customize CSS, product display and offer insights based on product reviews.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: The app integrates with Shopify, Klaviyo, and Zapier.

Launched in 2018, Octane AI is one of the older AI solutions on the Shopify platform. The app is designed to recommend products by using quizzes. The app can offer more specific product suggestions by asking prospects a series of questions. In addition to increasing purchases, users report that Octane AI increases email opt-ins.

3) ChatGPT

  • Free Trial Available: there is a free version and a paid version available.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI tool capable of answering questions, solving math problems, creating some programming code, and other functions.

ChatGPT, offered by OpenAI, was the first generative AI to see widespread use. While not explicitly created for Shopify, it can be a helpful tool for those willing to invest some time in experimentation.

For example, you can describe the features of your product (e.g., red shirt, large size, cotton, made in the USA, etc) and ask ChatGPT to create an engaging description. After a few back-and-forth iterations, you are more likely to get a helpful response. Experiment with providing additional context, such as “most of our customers are single women aged 18-25 who live in metropolitan areas in the United States,” to see if that provides greater context.

The true power of ChatGPT for Shopify unlocks when you pay for the paid plan (i.e., ChatGPT Plus). The paid plan is notably more powerful because it was trained on a more extensive data set. In addition, you get access to new features faster, like the ability to collaborate with others in a Chat GPT session. Currently, Chat GPT is focused on text chat and cannot be used to interact directly with your customers.

4) Arena Commerce AI

  • Free Trial Available: Yes, you can start using it for free
  • Notable Features and Integrations: Arena Commerce AI integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce.

Arena Commerce AI works on any website. Through a chat interface, the AI suggests products to your customers based on their interactions. For example, a clothing ecommerce website could use it to recommend accessories to complement a complete outfit.

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Arena’s AI is customizable in several ways to provide a better experience. You can choose the size of responses – a great feature to remember with mobile users. Also, you can select the ‘temperature’ – meaning how strict (or creative!) you want the AI to be in its interactions.

5) Yodel ChatGPT Product Description

  • Free Trial Available: There is a free plan available with a limited number of tokens per month.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: increase your SEO traffic by using the app to create meta descriptions. The app also offers bulk features to create and edit many variations quickly.

Do you like the ChatGPT concept but want a solution that is more focused on Shopify? Yodel is an AI-powered copywriting assistant focused on product descriptions. In contrast to the open-ended nature of Chat GPT, Yodel has a narrow focus on helping you create product descriptions.

Like other generative AI tools, there is a learning curve to master Yodel. Reviewers report that it took them some time to experiment to produce useful results. It is also wise to create backups of your descriptions before using the app if you encounter unexpected problems.

6) InCharge

  • Free Trial Available: there is a free trial available.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: the app integrates with Shopify and significant online advertising platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Snapchat and TikTok)

Much of the excitement in AI is focused on generative AI – using AI to create text, images, and other media. InCharge shows us that there is another way to use AI to grow your Shopify business: leveraging analytics.

Since the introduction of Apple iOS 14 in 2020, online marketing has been getting difficult. Without the tried and true way of tracking results, how are you supposed to decide which ads and marketing strategies to invest in? InCharge’s analytics technology uses AI to help Shopify stores increase their return on advertising spend (ROAS). The InCharge approach to analytics is special because it combines first-party data (What is first-party data?) and data from multiple platforms.

7) Translation Lab

  • Free Trial Available: Translation Lab has a free plan.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: The app’s supported languages include English, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, French, Japanese, and Portuguese.

Opening your store to buyers in other countries (or who use different languages) was tremendous work. Translation Lab is about to make that easier! Launched in 2019, the app is based on Google’s neural machine translation technology. In addition to language translation, the app offers multi-currency support.

Machine translation is a helpful way to get a first draft. However, verifying the quality of translations before using them on your website is also wise. Otherwise, you might make mistakes and hurt your brand’s reputation.

8) Squirai AI SEO

  • Free Trial Available: the app is free as of December 2023.
  • Notable Features and Integrations: the ability to scan your website to detect images that lack an ALT text description.

Achieving success in Shopify SEO requires paying attention to countless details. One lesser-known way to improve your SEO results involves your images. For the best results, all of the images you use on your store should have ALT text – a short written description of the image. Writing and updating all of these image descriptions required a tremendous amount of work.

Squirai AI SEO is an AI resource focused on image processing and text creation. Put this app into action, and you’ll quickly be able to generate ALT text for all of your images.

Keep Your Audience Engaged With Arena

Growing your Shopify business is far easier when your customers keep returning to your website and staying engaged for long periods. Reach out to Arena today to discuss how you can use live chat, live blog, and other solutions to keep your audience engaged and growing so you can sell more products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A product expert trained by your content

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

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

Check out some examples.

Commerce AI for publishers

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

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

Commerce AI for e-commerce

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

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

Drive the conversation into transactions

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

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

Add Commerce AI to your webstore in seconds

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

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

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

Try Commerce AI 

Request a Demo

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Grow Publisher Revenue Fast With Second-Screen Experiences

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Second-screen experiences are fast becoming one of the most popular ways to interact with content. Viewers watch the main action on a TV and then use a second screen – like a phone – to chat with others about what they’re watching or find more information.

Providing a strong second-screen experience is a compelling way to lift engagement. Increasing engagement is a worthwhile goal. Yet, what if boosting revenue is your number one priority? Second-screen experiences can directly help you increase revenue.

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Why Buying Broadcast Rights Isn’t The End of The Story

Buying broadcast rights, especially exclusive rights to marquee events like the Super Bowl or a hot HBO series, was a proven strategy. Exclusivity meant you were the only game in town for viewers, which helped to support high advertising rates. If you can afford such exclusivity, it’s a great strategy.

What if spending billions of dollars like Amazon for Thursday Night NFL football is out of the question for you? You can leverage a second-screen experience to piggyback on the popularity of a show or event. Content about an event – like a pre-game show in sports, red-carpet interviews at awards shows, and fan discussions – is proven to draw engagement.

All you need to get started is the right technology, like a live blog or live chat on your website, and something interesting to say! Fortunately, publishers live in a golden age of content creators and commentators. Almost every interest or category of pop culture today has influencers. So, invite a few influencers to participate in your live chat discussion.

Download our white paper “Generation Z and the Rise of the Second Screen” and transform your engagement strategy today.  

4 More Ways Publishers Can Lift Revenue With Second-Screen Experiences 

Once you start thinking creatively about second-screen experiences, there are five other powerful ways to lift revenue. 

1) Increase Advertising Revenue With New Formats

Advertising revenue is the traditional key revenue source for major publishers. Having a second-screen strategy in place helps in two ways. First, second-screen experiences lift engagement, so you have more eyes on your content for longer. Second, second-screen experiences make innovative ad formats more effective.

Take interactive ads, for example. These types of ads are widely used on social media platforms like Facebook. Instead of passively viewing copy, images, and videos, an interactive ad lets the audience act. This can include taking direct action, like playing a mobile game or browsing different versions of a product (e.g., clothing size and color).

Interactive ads do some of the heavy lifting to convert a casual viewer into a potential customer. Therefore, publishers may charge higher rates to show this type of ad.

2) Direct Sponsorship

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While related to traditional advertising, sponsorship deals are different. Typically, a sponsor will get a premium placement. You can offer the sponsor the opportunity to have a voice in the editorial process. For example, a sponsor may be interested in having one of their staff participate in an online event like a webinar or live chat session. 

Look at the event industry for examples of what you can achieve with direct sponsorship. Major conferences like CES offer multiple sponsorship opportunities for brands like a spot in the conference daily’s publication (CES Daily) and the CES Tech Talk Podcast. The event also includes intimate scale sponsorships for the CTA Member Lounge and CTA Member Party.

Adding sponsorship revenue to your publication is generally easier if you offer a discrete, unique event. For example, a publisher might have a dedicated team covering early Presidential primary elections. Alternatively, a publisher can run virtual events and feature one or two sponsors.

There are some downsides to direct sponsorships to keep in mind. Brands may ask for some exclusivity, so your offering and pricing need to reflect that. Further, the best sponsorship deals require old-fashioned dealmaking instead of programmatic platforms. The good news is that a successful sponsorship has the potential to mature into an ongoing relationship and bring revenue for years to come. 

The second-screen way to implement direct sponsorship is to focus on sponsorship for the secondary screen. It’s easier to design and package a second-screen experience like a live chat session on your website vs. making changes to a broadcast.

3) Subscriptions

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Gaining more paying subscribers is one of the best ways to increase revenue in the long term. There are at least two ways to package subscriptions to appeal to the second-screen audience: premium add-on to existing subscriptions and creating a distinct subscription offering. 

The premium add-on option is suitable for publishers with active digital subscribers. In this case, the approach is to offer an additional subscription option for second-screen users. 

For example, you might offer pre-event and post-event coverage for significant business developments such as initial public offerings (IPOs). By limiting access to those with a specific subscription tier, the subscription also provides exclusivity. The potential to gain early information ahead of others is one way to attract an engaged audience, like investors, who thrive on valuable information. 

What if you have no significant digital subscriber base? In that case, it’s vital to find more ways to distinguish your publication from other options on the market. Introducing a unique second-screen experience to your market may be the solution. For instance, your industry might not have a premium mobile app or mobile web experience available. In that case, a paid subscriber-only experience could stand out like a monthly event series.

4) Ecommerce

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There are a few ways to increase e-commerce-related revenue using second-screen experiences.

Affiliate Marketing

In contrast, to display advertising, affiliate marketing is a new category. Thanks to major players like Amazon, eBay, and others, the affiliate marketing market is already generating billions of dollars. By using affiliate links, a publisher can earn a commission by recommending products. 

The second-screen angle to affiliate marketing is to tie an affiliate marketing offer to something happening on the audience member’s primary screen. TV events with a significant celebrity presence – like the Emmys or Oscars – offer plenty of opportunities. For example, you might promote celebrity collectibles for sale at the high end (e.g., signed prints or posters) or lower-priced products (e.g., custom t-shirts produced at scale). 

Affiliate marketing isn’t for every publisher, however. It best suits publishers reviewing, ranking, and discussing consumer products like the Wire Cutter. 

Publisher Ecommerce

Some publishers have online stores selling apparel, accessories, back issues, and special prints. Selling more of their products – beyond traditional subscriptions – is another way to lift revenue.

To make your online store more appealing, look for ways to make a unique offering tied to a second-screen experience. For example, you might offer a discount code that leverages a plot point (e.g., the death of a character) in a significant streaming show. That kind of promotion has the virtue of being relatively simple to design and launch. The downside is that tying a promotion to an event like that has a short shelf life.

As you become more comfortable spotting and leveraging second-screen experiences, use several of these strategies in concert to keep growing. 

The Indispensable Foundation For Second-Screen Revenue Growth

There are multiple ways for publishers to boost revenue by leveraging second-screen offers and experiences. All of these strategies rely on having a few core ingredients, like having a highly engaging website. Adding Arena Live Chat to your website is one of the best ways to make your website more interactive. Discover more about how to build a thriving online community right on your website.

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Do You Want More First Party Data From Gen Z Consumers?

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Many first-party data marketing discussions and strategies have overlooked a key fact – the importance of value exchange. Publishers and brands want to connect, market, and sell to their audiences. Changing consumer behavior and regulations mean old practices of invisibly using cookies are no longer good enough. Millennials, Gen Z, and other digital natives will only consent to share their data with brands that offer them value.

Disclosure And Asking Permission Isn’t Enough To Build An Audience

Earning permission to market to customers sounds simple in theory. Put a pop-up on your website, collect contact information, and start marketing! For a small subset of customers – those who are actively comparison shopping, for instance – this simple approach to gaining the first party may be sufficient. For the vast majority of your audience, value exchange is critical.

Every time brands and publishers want to gather consent to market; it’s crucial to ask the value exchange question. Are users receiving sufficient value from our brand to welcome us to their digital world? The bar may be even higher for communication channels perceived as more personal, like email and SMS. Earning a place (and keeping it!) in those inboxes is not something to be taken for granted, as filtering and permissions technology keeps improving.

There are significant consequences for ignoring the value exchange question. Conversion rates are likely to deteriorate at first. That means digital advertising budgets to attract traffic will deliver fewer results. Ultimately, websites will struggle with having fewer and fewer engaged visitors. Hitting growth targets will get far more difficult. Worst of all, building deeper relationships with your audience, including learning their preferences, becomes increasingly demanding. 

The starting point to avoid these problems starts with understanding your market’s needs, wants, and desires. Let’s take a closer look at the Gen Z demographic and what they want.

What Does Gen Z Want?

Generation Z is defined as those born between 1996 and 2010. The Generation is 68 million strong in the United States, slightly larger than Gen X (65 million) and smaller than Millenials (72 million). Gen Z is already becoming significant economically, with $360 billion in disposable income, according to Forbes. Today, Gen Z has less purchasing power and wealth than older generations. Millennials have an estimated disposable income of $1.4 trillion, which is more than triple the disposable income of Gen Z ($360 billion). That said, Gen Z disposable income will only increase over time. Therefore, publishers that build and retain a Gen Z audience now will have a long-term advantage.

That leaves the question: what does Gen Z want from brands and publishers? Some ways to answer this question include looking at surveys and drawing insights from other customer cohorts.

Industry surveys of American Gen Z behavior have found that:

Gen Z is highly demographically diverse

In comparison to other generations, Gen Z is highly diverse, according to the Pew Research Center. For example, 25% of Gen Z is Hispanic compared to 17% of Millennials or 12% of Gen X. Also, Asian Americans comprise a growing portion – 6% – of the group. Marketing efforts need to reflect these expectations.

Higher Online Shopping But Fewer Impulse Purchases

Growing up in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, and high inflation, Gen Z has seen a lot of economic turbulence in a short time. A Creatopy survey found that 32% of Gen Z buy when there is a sale, and 48% buy when they need something. 

Gen Z cares strongly about social responsibility issues

Does your brand fight racial and sexual discrimination? A 2022 survey found that 66% of Gen Z agree or strongly prefer brands that take social responsibility seriously. For more tips, and warnings, on sustainability and social responsibility, check out our blog post on The Top 5 Gen z Shopping Trends.

Gen Z Are Heavy Social Media Users

Gen Z social media usage typically exceeds three hours a day. Regarding purchase decisions, TikTok videos, Instagram, and Facebook are vital.

Meeting these expectations is crucial for your brand to have an opportunity to compete today. Immediate gratification isn’t the whole story, however. Eventually, Gen Z will advance in their careers, buy homes and make other life changes. 

Putting Value Exchange For Gen Z At The Heart of Your Digital Strategy

For your digital strategy to thrive, each person who visits your online presence needs to see value in joining your community. Depending on your budget and strengths, there are different ways to offer compelling value. Some of the most popular ways to provide digital value to Gen Z include the following: 

Classic Direct Marketing Incentives

There’s a good reason why the vast majority of ecommerce brands use discount codes 

liberally. They work! Whether structured as a 10% off, buy one get one (“BOGO”), or some other structure, these incentives work well in e-commerce. The challenge is that so many brands use discounts that it can be tough to stand out in a sea of similar-sounding offers. 

Content

Offering interesting content remains a proven way to attract attention. A content strategy for Gen Z will need to include highly visual media like Instagram posts and TikTok videos. Regularly posting content will keep your brand top of mind when the audience is ready to buy.

Community

allowing your audience to connect with you and their peers is a powerful form of value exchange. Unlike marketing incentives and sales, building a thriving online community takes more effort. That means there is a greater opportunity to stand out and earn Gen Z’s attention.

Expressing Values and Identity

Social responsibility is a top concern for many in Gen Z. If your brand has active partnerships with non-profits or charitable organizations, emphasize this fact. If you donate a portion of purchases to good causes, feature that decision in marketing. Giving buyers the ability to express their values with purchases and community participation is a powerful way to set your brand apart.

How To Get More Engagement And Leads With Community Value

You probably have an active content and marketing program to connect with the Gen Z audience. The next step is transforming casual, anonymous website visitors into engaged audiences. Live digital community experiences using Arena Live Chat are a powerful way to do just that by holding online conferences, live shopping events, and more. Learn more about Arena Live Chat.

How to know the ROI for a Customer Data Platform

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Adding a customer data platform to your sales and marketing workflow takes some work. So, it’s worth asking the question: is it worth the effort to use a CDP? To find the answer, let’s look at ways to measure the ROI of a customer data platform. 

Calculating Customer Data Platform ROI Step By Step

In principle, deeply understanding customer behavior should drive higher revenue. Achieving that result takes time and the right approach. Let’s start by gathering the correct numbers.

1) Know Your Sales And Marketing Numbers Before Using A CDP

To fully understand the impact of a customer data platform on your business, it is crucial to gather some numbers. Precisely, measure these numbers before using a CDP and then look at them afterward.

  • The number of leads. This measure should be the easiest to track – count the number of leads you typically gain per month. If possible, look at six to twelve months of data and take the average.
  • Lead quality. There are different ways to determine lead quality. For example, you might measure the proportion of marketing-qualified leads that convert to sales-qualified leads.
  • Ad campaign effectiveness (e.g., cost per lead). Running a lead generation advertising campaign is much easier when you deeply understand your audience. If you’re just getting started, you are likely to have a high cost per lead. With better data, you can bring this figure down over time.
  • Sales cycle time. Measure the time between a lead’s first encounter with your business and purchase. While external factors, like the overall economic environment, also impact this figure, it is still intelligent to track. 

With these data points in mind, let’s proceed to the next phase of the ROI measurement process.

2) Install and configure your customer data platform.

In this step, install and configure your customer data platform. For this platform to deliver maximum value, take the time to review your customer data for quality. The ROI from the CDP will be low if you start with poor data.

To assess your customer data quality, consider the following points:

Do you have accurate information about customers and how they became customers?

Take a list of your 100 most recent customers and look at the customer journey. Ideally, your CDP should help you to understand their experience. For example, did the majority of prospects interact with sales only after attending a virtual event? If you don’t have this customer data yet, start planning to gather it. Customer surveys and automated tracking can help to address these points.

Without the ability to accurately trace the customer journey, measuring marketing effectiveness and making data-driven decisions about what to focus on next is difficult.

Are you gathering zero-party and first-party data from customers and prospects?

Third-party platforms like lead providers and social media have a role to play. However, these sources are limited. They don’t tell you what a given person thinks or feels about your specific brand. A fully implemented customer data platform can equip you with these insights. 

Zero-party data is data that customers decide to share with an organization like product preferences in a survey. For example, you might run a survey to customers about what websites and brands they like the most. Responses to this survey would be zero-party data. First-party data, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is data that a customer agrees to provide by using your website, interacting with your emails, and so forth. Regularly gathering these data points is an important way 

Are you using a scoring system?

Scoring becomes more important as you scale up your lead generation and marketing efforts. Large companies develop higher sophisticated models to score leads, but that’s not the only way. You can take a simpler approach if you’re just getting started. For example, you might distinguish between new prospects (i.e., they have been on your email list for less than five days), highly engaged leads (i.e., they have been on your email list for 30 days and have participated in an online event) and customers (i.e., they have purchased in the past 12 months). Classifying prospects into these three categories will help you make better decisions about using your marketing resources.

With this foundation, you’re ready to install your customer data platform.

3) Generate first-party data for your customer data platform

On its own, a customer data platform does not produce a return on investment. To achieve results, there are two more crucial ingredients. First, it’s vital to feed more data into the platform regularly. Second, taking sales and marketing actions is vital based on what you find in the CDP. Let’s start with the first ingredient.

Generating a steady stream of first-party data is one of the best ways to make your CDP more valuable. For most brands, it makes sense to focus on getting more people to your website and ensuring they have an engaging experience. A website visitor that arrives and leaves a few seconds later will not give you much to work with.

There are a few ways to make your website more appealing to customers. You start with a foundation of design, fast technology, and a simple user interface. Next, publish content that directly speaks to your customers’ needs and problems. Finally, enrich your website by transforming it into a virtual events platform using a live blog or a live chat experience. Taken together, technology, content, and community experiences will make your website more appealing. As website visitors keep returning over time, you will have more opportunities to gather data about their preferences.

Once your website generates a significant amount of first-party data, how do you transform that data into valuable insights? That’s what we’ll cover in the next section.

4) Develop new sales and marketing ideas based on CDP data

Your next step is to develop new ideas based on the data you’re seeing in your customer data platform. Success requires both art and science. The art is coming up with sales and marketing ideas regularly. The science is grounding those ideas in the data available on your platform. Let’s illustrate this principle with two examples.

Online publisher

A digital publisher is concerned about subscribers not renewing their subscriptions after the first year. To solve this problem, the publisher reviews their CDP and looks for patterns between people who renew their subscriptions and those who do not. The publisher may notice that 90% of renewing subscribers access paid content once per week and have attended at least two subscriber-only online events.

Based on these patterns, the publisher decides to test the following marketing campaign ideas:

  • Highlight the “best article of the week” to subscribers. The objective is to make it easier for subscribers to use – read just one article.
  • Improve virtual events with special guests. To make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing, the publisher invites celebrity guests to a “Ask Me Anything” session to make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing.

After developing these marketing campaign ideas, the publisher can measure the ROI of the campaign using their customer data platform. 

Ecommerce company

A clothing e-commerce company is finding it difficult to achieve a reasonable return on its online advertising campaigns. By using the CDP, the marketing manager quickly discovers the problem. Many customers buy only when the company offers discount codes and never buy again. Fortunately, the company has noticed that customers who come through referral campaigns (e.g., Instagram influencers creating sponsored posts) seem to lead to ongoing campaigns.

The e-commerce company developed a few new marketing campaign ideas based on these insights.

  • Increase budget allocation to influencer marketing campaigns.
  • Change the creative focus for paid advertising campaigns. Instead of advertising a discount offer, new campaigns take advantage of holiday promotions (e.g., back-to-school season).
  • Increase content marketing campaigns with partners to drive more referral traffic.

5) Gather the right data for a marketing ROI comparison.

If you’ve followed the process, you’ve installed a customer data platform, gathered new data, and implemented some new marketing ideas. Now, you can compare your marketing effectiveness before and after using the CDP.

To avoid confusing data, aim to make the pre-CDP and post-CDP implementation comparison as similar as possible. For example, focus on the same period (i.e., January to July of this year when you had the CDP vs. January to July of the previous year before you had the CDP).

Aim to exclude other factors that might significantly skew the results to the degree possible. For example, if there have been significant changes in the monthly marketing budget (e.g., $10,000 per month last year vs. $15,000 per month this year), be mindful of those changes. 

6) Measure the ROI of your customer data platform

In this step, you’ll directly compare the results achieved before using the CDP and after using the CDP. If you’ve been feeding high-quality data to the CDP and making business decisions based on CDP insights, you’re likely to see a substantial improvement in CDP return on investment. In this case, take a moment to celebrate with your marketing team! You’ve successfully leveraged data insights to grow your business!

What if the return on investment results aren’t that exciting? That’s entirely possible! In this situation, remember that marketing is a work in progress. Learn what you can from the campaigns that didn’t work out and try something new. 

Three Ways To Improve Customer Data Platform ROI

The following strategies will help you to get better results from your CDP. While each strategy is distinct, you’re likely to get better results using multiple strategies.

1) Look For Missing Customer Data

Missing key data points is a crucial reason customer data platforms provide limited results. For example, your focus might be on gathering data from website users. However, if the majority of customer conversations come from sales calls or social media, you might be missing key developments. Ensure your customer data platform gathers information from your website, social media, and key offline channels.

2) Validate Data With The Sales Team

For B2B companies, completing the transaction requires the sales team. Few customers are willing to make a $10,000 or $100,000 purchase without the chance to speak with a salesperson and get answers to their questions. 

There are a few ways to validate your CDP insights with the sales team. Start by looking at reports and reports from your customer relationship management (CRM). For example, look at the most recent 10-20 completed sales. Does the customer journey involve multiple touchpoints with sales representatives? If so, you might be missing those interactions in your CDP.

In addition to reviewing reports, make the time to speak with your sales colleagues. They’re emailing and calling customers every week. They can give you insights into the relevance of marketing materials (e.g., “customers loved the state of the industry report we released this year in January – can we produce more reports like that?”).

3) Take More Chances

The final way to get better results from your customer data platform is to take more chances. Specifically, we often see people gather plenty of data from customers and prospects and look at the patterns. However, some marketers are reluctant to set aside their preferences and take a risk based on what the CDP is telling them. For example, your CDP might show that video customer stories lead to better conversions. Yet, recording customer videos are often quite labor-intensive and require permission from multiple parties. Despite these challenges, it may be time to invest more in creating these assets. 

How To Get More Value From Your Customer Data Platform

You’ve seen that gathering data from a customer data platform is a powerful way to get more conversions and increase engagement. Ensure you have the right technology to gather and import first-party data into your systems to make the most of your platform. Arena Personas is a powerful tool to help you use first-party data to better segment your audiences and improve marketing efficiency.

Get More Customers With A Retarget Customer Data Platform

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

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

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

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

Gathering Your First-Party Data For Retargeting

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

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

4 Marketing Opportunities To Gather And Use First Party Data 

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

1) Offer Online Experiences To Potential Customers

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

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

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

E-Commerce Business Use Case

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

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

2) Create Campaigns For Your Current Customers 

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

B2B Enterprise Use Case

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

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

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

3) Get Better Lookalike Audiences

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

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

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

Individual Audience Factors

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

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

B2B Audience Factors

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

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

Is Your Audience Segment Too Large?

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

4) Lapsed Customer Engagement

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

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

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

The Final Ingredient To Successful Retargeting: Leverage Market Awareness

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

1) Top of Funnel

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

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

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

2) Middle of Funnel

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

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

3) Bottom of Funnel

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

Use Arena Personas To Get More of The Right Data

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

Top 40 Live Chat Benefits You Need to Know

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Arena Live Chat is one of the most powerful live chat platforms on the market. If you’re undecided on whether to try it, you might not know about the benefits.

Top 40 Live Chat Benefits

1) Increase sales

There’s a saying in sales: the confused mind does not buy. When customers have questions or doubts, they are less likely to buy.  With Arena Live Chat on your website, you can make it easy for customers to get answers about potential purchases. By providing quick answers to interested customers, you can earn more sales.

2) Build a community of fans on your website

Customers are probably talking about your brand and products, but those conversations are not happening on your website. Instead, those conversations are probably already happening on social media sites like your company’s Facebook page. When people talk about your brand away from your website, it is tough for you to provide answers and drive conversions.

By adding Arena Live Chat to your website, you can build a thriving community of users in two ways. First, your customers can make friends with each other during group chat sessions. Second, you can provide a welcoming virtual place for customers to come together as a community. If you want to see some solid events, check out how Nubank leveraged Anita’s community engagement for its IPO live event, or how Vans uses Arena Live Chat to aid live DJ music sets in its website.

3) Keep people on your website longer

According to Crazy Egg, the average person only spends 15 seconds on a website before leaving. Yikes! That’s not much time to make a good impression, let alone earn a sale or generate a lead. What if you could encourage users to spend 10 minutes or even an hour on your website happily?

That’s possible when you organize a virtual event with Arena Live Chat. For example, you could invite a social media influencer to present a live stream video session for an hour. During that session, attendees can ask questions through Arena Live Chat. In addition, you will have the opportunity to drive conversions by using the conversion card feature in Arena.

4) Qualify leads for the sales team

Is your sales team too busy with prospects who are not a fit for your products? That’s a problem you can solve by using Arena Live Chat. Invite customers to answer a few simple questions through chat before booking a call with sales.

For example, consider a B2B company that mainly sells to large companies with more than $100 million in revenue. In that case, the sales team shouldn’t spend their time talking to small businesses. You can use Arena Live Chat to qualify leads before they are sent to the sales team.

5) Reduce customer service delays

Forcing customers to wait in long phone queues to get customer service is no longer good enough. In 2020, more than 10% of customers abandoned their calls before being connected to an agent. When a customer gives up on their call, that disappointment hurts your company in two ways. First, you have lost a potential sale today. Second, the frustrated customer may complain to their friends and family.

Offering customer service through Arena Live Chat can help you to minimize customer service delays. For the best results, equip your customer service agents with a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document and other training to help them answer common questions quickly.

6) Create more engaging live events

Offering a live virtual event to your customers is a great way to build loyalty and drive sales. When planning an event, use the virtual events checklist to plan your event properly. At the same time, you also want to allow for some flexibility to adjust your topics based on what your customers are most interested in.

With Arena Live Chat, you can ask poll questions during an event to gather quick feedback. At the end of the event, you could ask attendees to vote on what your next live event should focus on. Acting on this feedback means you can avoid the frustration of offering live events that nobody is interested in attending. Swoogo has already found out that offering Live Chat is a home-run in live events.

7) Boost conversions in live shopping events

Live shopping events are an exciting way to drive increased sales. According to McKinsey, live shopping events may generate between 10-20% of all ecommerce sales by 2026.

During these events, customers are likely to have questions about product size, color, shipping, and much more. To make the most of your live shopping events, provide fast answers through Arena Live Chat.

8) Gain feedback on new product ideas

Are you debating what product to launch next? You could use market research surveys to gather insight on what people might want. That kind of research will yield some valuable insights. However, there is an even better way – get insight directly from customers using Arena Live Chat.

For instance, let’s say that you run a clothing brand and consider offering a line of blankets for winter. Before investing time in manufacturing and marketing, ask your next 100 live chat users if they are interested in a blanket. If the customers are interested, take note of their contact details and follow up with them later if you launch the product.  

9) Improve your chatbots

Adding a chatbot to your website is an excellent way to provide even faster customer service. However, chatbots are only as good as their input. One of the best ways to make your chatbots more effective is to look through your Arena Live Chat transcripts. You’re bound to find new ideas to make your chatbots more effective.

10) Enable flexible remote work

Survey after survey has shown that flexible remote work is popular with employees. According to Forbes, 74% of professional workers expect remote work to become standard in the coming years.

Give your employees the option to provide customer service, event support, and sales through live chat sessions. Giving your employees flexibility about when and where they work can drive productivity and help you retain more trained workers.

11) Add value to your product’s customization options

Many companies offer many different features, options, and customization choices. For example, think of an online jewelry store that lets customers choose different types of metal or engraving. Many customers like the idea of additional choices, but there is a downside. Your customers might get confused about how to use the options.

Use Arena Live Chat as a solution to this problem – let customers ask questions about custom options. With practice, you may even be able to increase the average order value by selling more upgrades.

12) Provide the most up to date information

Supply chain problems, new product launches, and staff turnover are just some of the changes your company might be managing today. With all of these changes, the information on your website might be out of date. For example, you might only be able to offer a few of your products in the extra-large size category.

With Arena Live Chat, you can invite customers to confirm the details of their order before they buy. This is a great way to prevent buyer’s remorse and disappointment.

13) Offer personalized service

Think about the last time you went to an excellent restaurant or hotel. The way staff greeted you and addressed your concerns was probably a big part of the experience. For example, you might have been asked if you were celebrating an occasion. Taking the time to ask a few good questions makes it much easier to offer a memorable customer service experience.

By engaging each customer through Arena Live Chat, you have the opportunity to build a relationship with the customer. Taking the time to listen to their comments and questions means customers are more likely to come back to your company.

14) Improve the quality of your sales training

Hiring and training a new salesperson is one of the best ways to grow a business. Unfortunately, it often takes a lot of trial and error for a junior salesperson to become effective. With the right approach, it’s possible to get sale people working productively quickly. How? Harness the power of live chat.

To improve the quality of your sale training, keep a log of the most common questions that customers ask during your Arena Live Chat sessions. By developing accurate and persuasive answers to those questions, your salespeople can be prepared to answer common concerns and close more sales. 

15) Enhance the post-sales experience

Making a sale today matters, but the long term is even more critical. If you engage customers thoroughly and pay attention to the details, they are more likely to keep buying from you in the future. 

You can enhance the post-sales customer experience with Arena Live Chat. For example, send customers a message inviting them to ask questions when their new product arrives. Nobody likes to look uninformed but accepting an invitation to a live chat session is different.

16) Grow customer service agent productivity

More sales mean more customer service employees, right? Not necessarily! It all depends on how you plan out your customer service program. For example, a company that only offers telephone customer service might hire more staff to keep up with demand.

By offering Arena Live Chat, you can grow customer service productivity without skyrocketing your costs. Why? A customer service person can easily maintain a few chat sessions at the same time. 

17) Encourage employee service specialization

Specialized employees are often able to provide better customer service and close more sales. Yet, encouraging generalist employees to develop a specialty can be difficult. One way to overcome this reluctance is to start small: encourage specialization through chat.

With Arena Live Chat, employees work with different kinds of customers and sales conversations. After a few weeks, they may better understand what kinds of customers and products they find most interesting. In this manner, live chat helps your employees quickly discover their strengths and build expertise.

18) Enhance the quality of your sales coaching

Sales managers have an essential role to play in helping their employees to improve their sales skills. Unfortunately, it is relatively complex for a sales manager to observe their sales reps in action and provide timely feedback. Asking managers to review live chat sessions can help.

When your sales representatives finish a sales chat session, encourage them to send the transcript to their manager for review. By asking an experienced person to review the interaction, it should be easy to find a few ways to improve. For example, the sales manager might encourage their staff to ask more questions early in the chat session to understand customer needs better.

19) Reduce painful interruptions for customers

In today’s digital world, it is difficult to get focused. Once you get down to work, the last thing you want is an unwanted sales call. At the same time, managers know it is essential to make it easy for customers to reach out. 

Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes it easy for customers to reach out when they have questions. By focusing your effort on people interested in what you have to offer, you can avoid wasting time on disinterested people. 

20) Never lose another sales lead

In benefit 4, you learned that live chat could be an excellent way to qualify sales leads. That is helpful if your business is overwhelmed with prospects. Your situation might be quite different. If you are struggling to meet your revenue goals, you can use live chat to maximize leads instead.

Use Arena Live Chat to engage every website visitor and ask them questions about their needs. In this way, you can make a personalized pitch to every person who comes through your website.

21) Make your website more inviting to customers

Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect visiting a traditional website. It is a passive window shopping experience. You can look at product photos, view videos, and look up order status information. The lack of interaction means customers may become disengaged before finding the right product.

Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes your website more like a store where employees greet customers as they come in. By making your website more inviting, customers may be more comfortable asking questions. 

22) Discover your customer’s pain points and solve them

Right now, your potential customers have questions, concerns, and worries about doing business with you. They might be worried that your shipping service or return policy isn’t going to work for them. Every business has different customer concerns to face. Ultimately, you can only solve these problems and get more sales if you know those concerns.

You can discover the worries that hold people back from buying by encouraging customers to ask more questions through Arena Live Chat. Once you have those insights, you can update your website to answer those concerns.   

23) Cross-sell related products and accessories

Cross-selling is one of the best ways to increase revenue. Fast food restaurants mastered this technique years ago by offering customers fries, drinks, and other items when they ordered. You can make similar offers to customers once you start a conversation.

For example, let’s say you have an online sports apparel store. A customer might start by asking about running shoes. By offering an Arena Live Chat session on your product page, you can answer questions about shoes and suggest related products (e.g., running shorts and shirts). 

24) Meet customer expectations for interaction

Keeping up with changing customer expectations is essential. For example, most businesses know that they need a modern website and a social media presence today. Today, many customers expect a live chat experience. More than 40% of customers expect live chat on the websites they use, and that number is likely to rise.

To stay competitive with customer demand, install Arena Live Chat on your website. You can get started for free. 

25) Track customer service performance

Do you know if your customer service is performing well? Traditional ways of measuring performance – like measuring how long it takes to answer a phone call – are limited. It is far better to look at the quality of live chat interactions.

Arena Live Chat includes analytics so that you can better understand how well you are answering customer questions over time.

26) Serve international customers

Did you know that more than one-quarter of revenue earned by S&P 500 companies came from outside the US? Your company might have customers around the world! Serving customers in different time zones and languages doesn’t have to be complicated.

Arena Live Chat can run around the clock on your website. For example, you can staff your live chat function with staff in the US and UK to provide customer service in the US and Europe.

27) Reduce product returns

When unhappy customers return products, your profitability is likely to suffer. Unfortunately, product returns are a significant problem for online companies. CNBC reports the returns cost the retail industry over $1 trillion annually. 

To reduce your product return expenses, engage customers in more conversations before they buy. Taking 5 minutes to answer questions before a customer buys pays off right away in higher satisfaction, lower complaints, and fewer returns.

28) Engage B2B or B2C leads

Consumers and corporate customers have different needs. A corporate employee buying laptops might have questions about contracts, support services, and discounts if they order 500 computers. In contrast, a consumer may ask questions like which computer is best for gaming.

If your company sells to multiple markets, use Arena Live Chat to start the conversation. If a customer says they are buying on behalf of a company, you can route the inquiry to the B2B team to address right away.

29) Troubleshoot live shopping

Live shopping events are taking off in popularity for many ecommerce companies. These events blend entertainment and retail into an appealing package. However, many consumers are still learning how to use this technology. When technical problems occur during these events, providing fast support is critical.

In your next live shopping event, use Arena Live Chat as your support platform. If you fail to offer easy-to-access support, customers experiencing technical problems might give up and leave your event.

30) Build trust in your company

Building trust with customers in the online world can be challenging. Customers may be worried about their privacy and security. Others may wonder if your company can deliver. Facing these concerns directly through a conversation is one of the best approaches.

You can use Arena Live Chat to build trust with your potential customers through multiple interactions. Taking the time to answer questions today through live chat means you can make a positive impression.

31) Improve webinars and virtual classes with feedback

Delivering a webinar or virtual class is a powerful way to equip people with new knowledge. Yet, there are downsides to virtual education and training. It is difficult for the teacher to connect with their audience. Without that connection, students may become disengaged.

With the polls feature of Arena Live Chat, you can make your online learning more engaging. For instance, you can follow up on an assignment with a poll and determine which topics students want to cover in a review. In this way, a teacher can quickly adapt a virtual class to suit student needs.

32) Make asking questions embarrassment free

Asking questions is the key to unlocking sales and connecting with customers. However, some people are reluctant to raise their hands and ask a question. Why? Nobody enjoys looking uninformed, especially in front of an audience, like a live virtual event.

Using the direct message (DM) feature of Arena Live Chat solves this problem. Event attendees can ask questions privately without fear of embarrassment by sending a DM to the event host. 

33) Run engaging family-friendly virtual events

Offering a virtual event suitable for the whole family is challenging. For example, a sports broadcaster might want to encourage a broad audience to view online coverage and participate in online coverage. A public virtual event carries a risk – some people might attempt to disrupt the event with profanity or spam comments. Failing to address this kind of disruption quickly can make the event hosts look incompetent.

Arena Live Chat comes with moderation tools that make it simple to stop profanity automatically. In addition, you can quietly remove disruptive users from the live chat event. These features make it much easier to keep your virtual events engaging and family-friendly.

34) Support advanced marketing campaigns

The changing landscape of digital marketing means companies have to change how they engage with customers. Recent changes by Apple and Google are making traditional digital marketing methods less effective.

One solution to these challenges lies in leveraging the Arena customer data platform and live chat together. For instance, you can identify patterns between customer interests (e.g., sports, business, lifestyle) as expressed in website activity and purchases. Understanding these links can help you to create more relevant marketing campaigns.

35) Quickly improve website engagement

In the online world, high engagement is crucial. Low engagement can cause your conversions to fall. There are also signs that Google and other search engines consider user engagement from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. Unfortunately, some ways to increase engagement are brutal, like redesigning an entire website! 

On the other hand, you can install Arena Live Chat on your website in less than 10 minutes. It is one of the fastest ways to make your website more engaging.

36) Improve question & answer (Q&A) sessions

In live shopping events, webinars, and other live events, you might decide to offer a dedicated Q&A session at the end of the event. In larger events with dozens or hundreds of participants, keeping up with the questions is tricky, especially if questions are mixed with other comments in the chat window.

Arena Live Chat makes Q&A sessions easy to manage by organizing all live chat questions in a dedicated Q&A area. Event moderators can then decide which questions to answer.

37) Boost engagement with chat channels

In a conference, participants can go to panels and sessions that specifically relate to their interests. With virtual live events, it can be more challenging to engage each niche interest. Using custom chat channels is one way to solve this engagement challenge.

Arena Live Chat offers dedicated channels for your live chat sessions. For example, you could have one channel for customers, one for technical support, and one for future event suggestions.

38) Keep users engaged with social profiles

Nobody likes to feel like a number in the online world. Unfortunately, some chat tools give users generic usernames and numbers. It doesn’t have to be that way.

When users sign up on Arena Live Chat, they can create custom user profiles with avatars to make them more personal.

39) Avoid live chat reply confusion

With dozens, hundreds, or thousands of live chat participants, it is easy to get confused. One friend might send a question in the chat room to somebody else only to obscure that question by the flood of chat comments.

Arena Live Chat offers reply features so that user replies are kept together with the main message. That’s valuable because user conversations are never lost in the noise as a result.

40) Drive conversions with conversion cards

Organizing a virtual event takes significant time and effort. You might spend hours writing a virtual event script, inviting guest speakers, and promoting the event. Offering interesting content matters, but you also have to watch business results like conversions and purchases. 

Arena Live Chat helps you achieve goals like lead generation and purchases through conversion cards. You can use these cards at several points during your live chat session to draw attention to your offers. By using a few conversion cards at every event, you’ll never have to struggle to prove the ROI of your live chat events.

Get Started Today For Free

Arena Live Chat is simple to install – most customers install it on their websites in less than 10 minutes. Not sure if it is suitable for your company? You can try Arena Live Chat for free.

Arena raises Series A to Create Business Engagement Platform

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

Arena.im Series A investors

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

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

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

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

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

Product engagement as the ultimate weapon of growth

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

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

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

We’re in the perfect storm 

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

How we became successful: No-code and PLG approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arena is building a market leading Customer Engagement Platform

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

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

Get started with Arena

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

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

Come work with us

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

The Top 7 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2022

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Knowing the top trends in digital marketing in 2022 is critical to hitting your goals. New opportunities are vitally important, whether you are looking to increase audience growth, engagement, leads, or conversions.

Achieving early success on newer marketing platforms often leads to big wins. In the early days of Facebook, it was easy to get significant amounts of organic traffic. In paid advertising, clicks from Google were almost shockingly inexpensive in the 2000s. To give yourself the best chance of winning this year, review these marketing trends and determine which impacts your goals.

The Top 7 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2022

1) TikTok Is Here To Stay

Since 2020, TikTok has exploded in popularity to more than 1 billion monthly active users as of September 2021. Those numbers put the platform in the same league as Facebook (2.9 billion monthly active users) and YouTube (2.3 billion monthly active users). Some digital marketing experts dismissed TikTok for a while because of the platform’s limited features and youthful demographics.

TikTok is changing, and major brands are achieving big wins. For example, e.l.f cosmetics has achieved over 1 billion views through their #EyesLipsFace campaign. The first step is to create an account for your brand and start to follow a few accounts.

2) YouTube Advertising Is Booming

YouTube, one of the most popular video-sharing sites globally, is getting better and better for advertisers. The video site earned tens of billions in revenue in 2021, far ahead of other social networks.

There are multiple ways to execute YouTube’s growth. You can use the platform’s extensive menu of advertising options, including skippable and non-skipped videos. Also, you can work directly with Youtubers to sponsor videos. 

3) Seize Early Adopter Advantage In The Metaverse  

In the fall of 2021, many digital marketers became excited about the potential of metaverse when Facebook embraced the concept by renaming itself. Since that time, some of the enthusiasm has faded away. 

For digital marketers with a long-term view, investing heavily in the metaverse this year can pay off for years. In contrast to social media platforms, metaverse technologies are relatively immature. The easiest way to get started is by adding a metaverse element to your online events. 

For those not yet convinced about the value of the metaverse, consider a few numbers. In 2021, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) invested $10 billion into metaverse efforts, according to the New York Times. There are also more than 300 active metaverse startups working on the technology. Spend some time in metaverse games and virtual reality this year to familiarize yourself with the technology and its potential. 

4) Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Over the past few years, NFTs have boomed in popularity reaching $21 billion in 2021. An industry forecast recently estimated that the global NFT market will grow to more than $80 billion by 2016. A significant amount of recent NFT activity is driven by low-interest rates and speculation. While NFT growth may slow as the hype cools down, the category presents a major opportunity for digital marketing,

By creating and issuing NFTS, brands have the opportunity to create new excitement. For example, Fortune created a NFT based on a magazine cover in 2021. Instead of spending heavily on traditional swag for conferences, it might just be the time to create NFTs to promote your online events.

5) First and zero party data

If you’ve been following recent moves by Apple and Google, you already know that traditional Internet marketing cookies are declining in value. The end of the marketing cookie means that marketers need to find new ways to understand their audiences. The old way of running retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Google are not going to produce the same results any longer.

The solution is to focus on first part and zero party data. First party data is data you collect directly from your audience. To collect that data, you need to give customers a reason to keep visiting your website like offering exciting content and online events is the first step to growing your audience. Once you have your audience on your website, you need a way to systematically understand them. That’s where using a customer data platform can make a vital difference. With Arena CDP, you can easily determine which content, online events and actions customers take on the road to making a purchase.

Once you have your foundation of first party data, you can start to gather more zero party data. The classic example of zero party data is a customer purchase intent like color or size of a product they are most interested in buying.

6) Live Shopping

Live Shopping remains a growing marketing opportunity for retailers and ecommerce brands. From a base of $21 billion in 2021, this opportunity is slated to grow to $35 billion by 2024 according to Statista.

The current approach to live shopping carries risks however. Today, the most popular platforms for live shopping events are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon Live. Relying exclusively on these platforms means your audience might get easily distracted by other content and notifications. Further, your ability to gather additional data for your customer data platform from third party websites is limited.

We forecast that more and more brands will shift their attention to creating their own live shopping events on their own sites. To ride this trend, use Arena Live Chat to power your live shopping event. 

7) Diversity and inclusion initiatives

Digital marketers are increasingly expected to respond quickly to our society’s social justice, diversity and inclusion expectations. According to Deloitte research, 35% of buyers in the 18-25 year old audience often notice representative advertising at the time of purchase. The research found a similar pattern in travel, household equipment and banking industries. 

However, don’t underestimate your customers – they can see through shallow efforts at inclusivity. Token efforts to fulfill diversity may even backfire and undermine your marketing objectives.

Instead, your goal must be to authentically embrace diversity in your marketing efforts. At a minimum, review your use of images and videos. Next, look at your reviews, testimonials and customer stories. It’s entirely possible that your brand has a significant blindspot like failing to include women.

The Marketing Channel To Invest In This Year

Live digital events are cost effective and convenient for your audience. At the same time, many marketers are still learning how to design and launch successful online events. To help you succeed in the online event world, check out free report on 2022 Virtual Events Trends.

Vimeo vs Uscreen: Facts To Consider

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Choosing between several video streaming platforms isn’t always that clear, specially when you are not familiarized with the existing options out there. This decision can profoundly influence user experience, engagement, and potential revenue streams. This article dives deep into two popular contenders in the video streaming arena: Vimeo OTT and Uscreen, exploring key aspects that can guide businesses in making an informed selection.

Let’s dissect Vimeo OTT and Uscreen on six key fronts:

1) Branding Consistency

  • Vimeo OTT: Offers an integrated experience. It provides not only the streaming service but also the tools to design mobile and smart TV apps aligned with your brand aesthetics.
  • Uscreen: While it allows you to produce branded apps, the onus falls on your team to manage the entire app development lifecycle.

2) Monetization Strategy

  • Vimeo OTT: Provides a flexible revenue model, catering to advertising, direct sales, subscriptions, and registrations. Additionally, it gives total control over subscriber data, aiding in decision-making.
  • Uscreen: Offers a range of monetization strategies such as royalties and in-app purchases. However, its advertising support remains ambiguous.

3) Playback Versatility

  • Vimeo OTT: Boasts extensive compatibility, supporting iOS, Android, intelligent TV platforms, and even the Xbox ecosystem.
  • Uscreen: Offers compatibility with platforms like Chromecast and Apple Airplay, yet its reach isn’t as expansive as Vimeo.

4) Industry Tenure

  • Vimeo OTT: With a legacy since 2004, Vimeo has been a trusted companion for streamers across various genres.
  • Uscreen: Launched in 2015, Uscreen, while competent, doesn’t share the same historical depth.

5) User Testimonials

  • Vimeo OTT: G2 ratings highlight its user-friendliness and support quality, although some users desire better pricing options.
  • Uscreen: Users laud its ease of use and exemplary customer service but do yearn for improved analytics and customization.

6) Integration Capabilities

  • Vimeo OTT: Exhibits a vast integration landscape, spanning Google Drive to Zoom, facilitating streamlined operations.
  • Uscreen: Prioritizes analytics and e-commerce with integrations like Google Tag Manager and Mailchimp, but appears limited in video distribution.

‍See our post, which highlights ten different Vimeo OTT examples for more details.

Amplifying Vimeo with Arena’s Touch

Our verdict tilts towards Vimeo OTT for contemporary video streaming requirements. Yet, regardless of platform selection, to genuinely enhance audience engagement, embedding interactivity is crucial.

Arena’s capabilities seamlessly marry with Vimeo OTT, infusing live chat and live blogs, enriching the passive video experience. With the introduction of Arena Personas, you can also deep dive into your audience’s behaviors and preferences, ensuring your streaming content is not just viewed but experienced.

For those steering their company’s digital footprint, understanding these nuances and integrating tools like Arena’s live blogs can be the game-changer in achieving your marketing objectives. Dive deeper, make informed choices, and watch your virtual engagement landscape transform.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uMMuAV0I9Y

What if you’re not sure what’s working in your video streaming? There’s no need to guess anymore. Use Arena Personas to understand what interactions and content drive your audience to engage, convert and buy.