Category Archives: E-Commerce

Virtual Events: Stats and Trends You Need To Succeed

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Virtual events have continued to increase in popularity in 2021. To put the year’s virtual events in context, this year in review will reveal the virtual event stats, key trends and opportunities you need to succeed next year.

4 Facts You Need To Know About Virtual Events

Recent industry research commissioned by LinkedIn reveals essential insights about the evolving nature of business events.

1. Majority of Event Organizers Have Launched Virtual Events. 

Across Germany, UAE, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany, most event organizers arranged a virtual event, webinar, or online talk in 2020.

2. Fully Virtual Events Grow In Popularity. 

50% of events organized in the UK and Ireland have focused entirely on virtual events.

3. Critical Drivers For Virtual Events. 

Health concerns related to the pandemic are not the only driver for virtual events. In addition, one-third to one-half of event organizers think that virtual events are more cost-effective than traditional events. Further, saving travel time and environmental concerns are other key motivations for virtual events.

4. Virtual Event Content Quality. 

A significant number (44% in the UK and 38% in Germany) of event professionals agree that content development is a key priority. As expectations for event quality increase, there’s no need to start your virtual event planning from scratch. Download a copy of Arena’s Live Events Ebook to make your next virtual event more engaging.

Virtual Event Best Practices: 3 Ways To Maximize Engagement

In the past, organizing a virtual event or webinar was something of a novelty. That novelty has long since worn off. To keep your audience engaged in your content, aligning with the following best practices is vital.

1. Adjust Session Length. 

Asking attendees to sit through hour-long lecture-style events may not be effective any longer. Instead, consider adjusting your approach to emphasize shorter presentations. For inspiration, see the TED website, which features a significant number of presentations less than 20 minutes long.

2. Encourage Participant Interaction. 

Use live chat capabilities to allow attendees to ask questions. If there is no easy way to interact, you run the risk of attendees becoming disengaged. To get started in live chat, check out our post What Is Live Chat?

3. Invite Multiple Speakers. 

Offering diverse perspectives gives you more opportunities to connect with your audience. Use the live events script ebook to organize your content. Once your content is developed, invite multiple people from your company to give a presentation. If you have the budget, invite an outside speaker or influencer to deliver a short talk.

From Presentations To Live Shopping

Traditionally, virtual events like webinars and virtual conferences emphasized sharing content and networking. Those types of events are still important and worth organizing. That said, traditional virtual events do not directly drive revenue in most cases. If your company needs to grow revenue faster, you need a different approach: live ecommerce. In a live ecommerce event, you have the opportunity to present products to your audience and drive immediate sales. Livestream e-commerce sales in the US are projected to grow to $17 billion in 2022, up from $6 billion in 2020, according to Statista.

To plan your next live ecommerce event, use Arena’s Live Ecommerce ebook as your starting point.

The Most Successful Virtual Events of 2021 And What You Can Learn From Them

It is easier to plan your next virtual event with your team when you have examples to discuss. Use this list of events

Collins Aerospace: Keep Events Focused With Moderation

Remember when virtual meetings were disrupted by “Zoom bombing”? In its most extreme form, some of these disruptive participants posted harmful and alarming content. This kind of disruption is a risk that needs to manage in virtual events. Thoughtful event moderation can go a long way to prevent disruptions and keep attendees focused.

The; Collins Aerospace’s Introduce a Girl to Engineering virtual event was aimed at young girls to encourage them to consider careers in aerospace and engineering. In February 2021, the company invited students from five local schools to meet engineers and Joan Higginbotham, a former NASA astronaut. By using moderation, special guests, and a small invite list, the company created an engaging experience.

Virtual Event Lessons

There are a few lessons to adapt from the Collins Aerospace experience.

  • Consider Small Events. Events with a few dozen participants can be successful. Large scale events with hundreds or thousands of attendees tend to get all the attention but smaller events
  • Family-Friendly Event Design. The company’s decision to focus on teenage girls meant moderation was important. Arena Live Chat offers built-in moderation features so you can create a family-friendly experience.

YouTube Launches Multi-Day Virtual Shopping Event.

Short duration events of 1-2 hours are popular, but they are not the only approach. In November 2021, the video streaming platform ran the event YouTube Holiday Stream and Shop. The event drew participation from multiple YouTube personalities like Gordon Ramsay, Patrick Starrr, Jackie Aina, and MrBeast.

Virtual Event Lessons

There are two key lessons to draw from YouTube’s live ecommerce virtual events.

Delivering surprises to attendees is the crucial learning from YouTube’s 2021 entrance into live shopping. In a recent survey, 75% of shoppers agreed that the video platform “enhances the traditional shopping journey by delivering unexpected inspiration.” This is a crucial lesson as you plan your virtual event. For example, how can you offer exclusive product news, limited editions, or access to exciting presenters? Take inspiration from YouTube’s live shopping development to engage customers.

Consider organizing events over several days and connecting those events back to a seasonal trend. In the case of YouTube’s virtual events, the event was tied to the holiday shopping season.

Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue

Held in March 2021, this virtual event was sponsored by Siemens Energy, ING Bank, and other companies. The event’s approach to attendee engagement included the event moderator highlighting comments from attendees.

Virtual Event Lessons

The Berlin event offers a key lesson for you as you plan your event. Event moderators encouraged attendees to post questions for speakers on Twitter. Seeking input from attendees is a great idea. However, there is a downside to relying on social media sites. Event attendees might get distracted by conversations unrelated to the event and disengage. A better approach is to use Arena Live Chat to keep attendees on your website while they ask questions.

Keeping attendees on your website also means you can form direct relationships with customers. Traditional Google cookies are disappearing due to privacy changes. Keeping virtual event attendees on your website makes it far easier to use a customer data platform to understand audience behavior.

Hybrid Events

In addition to entirely virtual events, many organizations and organizers are developing hybrid events. In this type of event, an attendee has the option to participate virtually or in person. For example, Social Media Marketing World is offering four kinds of tickets for its next event. The higher-priced tickets include in-person access to the event. At the same time, Social Media Marketing World also offers “streaming” and “on-demand” tickets to accommodate virtual-only attendees.

Without careful planning, keeping everyone engaged in a hybrid event can fail. Virtual event attendees may feel left out of the conversation happening in the conference center. Using Arena Live Blog to share live updates from your event as it unfolds makes it easier for virtual attendees to feel involved.

How To Get Started With Virtual Events

Virtual events and hybrid events are here to stay. Your only question is to decide when you will take advantage of this way to engage with customers. Adding Arena Live Chat and Live Blog to your website is fast to make your virtual events more engaging.

Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Businesses

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You have heard how important customer engagement is for so many times now. But what does having an effective customer engagement strategy really mean? Is it all about giving your prospects and customers a seamless experience with your products and services? Or is it all about keeping up to date with your latest offerings? 

Today, we will talk about taking your business to a whole new level by understanding in depth what customer engagement is and employing effective strategies that will make them advocates of the brand you are building this 2021.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is a facet of Marketing where external customers or companies interact with a brand through various channels – offline and online. Simply put, it is when a prospect or a customer “connects” emotionally with your brand. 

One of the goals of every marketer is to keep the customers engaged even after they have successfully closed the sale.

Besides growing your revenue and boosting your brand awareness, customer engagement is all about treating your customers like a gift that keeps on giving because according to a study, 84% of customers say that being treated like a human being and having their needs met by a business is crucial in their buying decision because 70% of buying decisions come from how customers feel at the time of their purchase.

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There are many factors to consider when we think about the statistics but if we provide a platform that will help our prospects feel that they are prioritized, then all the more that we can expect sales closures of your brand.

Customer Engagement Strategies

1. Give the best Customer Experience (CX) to your prospects

Putting your customers’ needs first will always bring good business. Once you get this part covered, it will deliver benefits to your business, like increased customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and more positive reviews when it comes to word-of-mouth marketing.

Before implementing any automation for your business, try walking into your customers’ shoes and see if it answers their needs and if it leads them to your ultimate goal of making a sale.

2. Implement automation to increase productivity

As part of optimizing the customer experience, it is very important to implement features in your business that will make your customers feel prioritized with less amount of hassle on your part.

Using Arena’s features and technology like Live Chat and Live Blog where you can customize your brand’s responses to customer’s possible queries, publishing content real-time in a blog format are some automation examples that not only will it improve customer engagement but will give your customers a better walkthrough of your brand but will save you a lot of time and manpower requirements.

3. Collate data on points of interaction and customer behavior across your platform

The implementation of this strategy starts by asking the question, “At what point do my customers start inquiring and at what point do my prospects abandon the usage of my platform?”

There are tons of ways to gather these types of data and with the help of analytics, you will be able to pinpoint the instances on where you are going to focus interaction and where you are lagging for you to act. 

4. Offer personalized service

There is nothing better when customers feel that the products or services they use are meant for them.

As we have discussed earlier, customer engagement is enabling an “emotional connection” between the customer and the business with the intent of them not just continually purchasing but for them to become advocates of your product or service.

In observation of this strategy, companies like Arena help businesses ease out their operations by providing customers with Live Chat features that are easily customizable and will fit the needs of your target audience.

5. Take feedback seriously

In this day and age, we are able to deliver products and services to our customers even without seeing their faces. But that does not mean that we can slack off on resolving customer feedback, whether it is positive or otherwise. Because of this phenomenon, you must consider feedback as your friend.

There must be a reason behind customers not pushing through with the purchase. And it is our duty as marketers to identify what went wrong, in which part did we lack support, and how to further meet customer expectations. Just sending out short surveys will do.

Remember, feedback is a gift. Customers are not required to respond to our surveys but once they do, it is their message to us that there may be areas for improvement and they need to see changes. That is one characteristic of customer-centric service.

The Five Stages of Customer Engagement

Marketing practices today have changed a lot of decades before. And with similarity to a business entity, Customer Engagement also has a life cycle.

The intent of identifying the five stages of customer engagement will help businesses simplify which action plan to take and make it more manageable because not all business models are alike and customer engagement data can come from an infinite number of sources.

1. Discover

Before you get sales closures and make a lot of money, your product or service must first be heard by your potential customers. The initiatives of this stage include sending weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly newsletter of your latest offering, publishing current updates from the company, and so on.

This is basically the point where you cast your net to see which fishes will take interest in your offering.

Conceptualizing and formulating content for this stage proves to be both time-consuming and demanding of manpower, it is noteworthy though that companies like Arena offer services like Live Blog, among others, to further improve your level of customer engagement.

This stage also, is where you use analytics to track customer behavior and how they respond to every point of interaction you employ.

2. Shop

This stage will be realized once marketing efforts from the Discovery stage are effective. It indicates that your prospects are interested in your product or service and they find value in what you provide.

It is nice to know that customers visit your shop online and offline, but for us, marketers, identifying the source of that traffic is crucial to proceed to the next stage.

Once sources of traffic are identified, it is a must to push further the strategy to keep prospects coming. Afterward, evaluate both online and offline data together to further illuminate your actions as to how the customers are attracted to your platforms.

3. Buy

In this stage, marketers must be able to answer the question as to which part of the sale happens and as to which part of the sale is abandoned. Are there features to the sales process that are lacking in the platform? Are there common payment gateways that are unavailable when customers try to check out which leads to the fallout of sales?

With Arena’s Live Blog solutions, there are several ways to follow through with customers and improve customer engagement.

Using the Live Blog structure, Arena provides businesses with added tools that serve as points of interaction, retain customer attention on your page, and further allow user participation with real-time content.

Marketers must as well be ready with follow-through solutions to customers that abandon their basket and robust outbound support to address customer concerns that will eventually lead to conversion.

4. Own

In other words, retain. Perhaps this stage is one of the most misunderstood and misinformed stages on the part of the marketer. Even sophisticated marketers do not really understand the depth of importance this stage gives.

At this stage, the marketer has to identify the level of attrition – usually from first-time or first-year buyers. In this way, we will be able to fully understand the triggers that discourage first-time buyers from becoming repeat customers.

Remember, a customer’s successful purchase is also an investment on their part. If there are concerns or issues that these customers encounter in the first-year purchase, surely, they will expect the same issues to arise on their second-year purchase unless these issues are resolved immediately by the business.

5. Advocate

Proficient marketers understand that customer engagement does not end when the prospect successfully checks out their purchase. Rather, it is an ongoing cycle of continuous information to the point where customers become loyal to your brand based on the metrics of loyalty that you will set.

In time, these loyal customers shall serve as your advocates and shall be the ones to help you out in your marketing efforts because who knows the customer experience better than those actually bought?

After all the exhaustive discussion on customer engagement and the effective strategies that need to be implemented in order to level up your business this 2021, it is undoubtedly a vital aspect of your marketing practices.

But knowing that there are platforms like Arena which offers technologies like Live Chat and Live Blog, among others, is assuring how the ease of implementation from this platform presents a huge and positive impact on the growth of your business this 2021.; Try Arena for FREE now!

How to enhance Customer Experience with Live Chat

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

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

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

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

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

What is Live Chat?

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

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

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

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

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

Why should you pay attention to Live Chat software? 

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

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

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

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

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

Other benefits of Live Chat include:

Non-intrusive communication

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

Personalization

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

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

Productivity

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

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

Customer Support and Live Chat: statistics behind this combination

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

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

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

Live Chat Examples

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

Facebook Messenger

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

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

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

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

Amazon’s Live Chat 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple’s Live Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Multifunctional Live Chat

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

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

  1. Simple Setup

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

  1. Scalable

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

  1. Customizable

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

  1. Social Features

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

  1. Control Dashboard

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

Try a free live chat now

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

Live Chat: Shorten Sales Cycle & Improve CX

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If you want to close deals faster and improve the customer buying journey, Live Chat can be an excellent tool for your sales team. Find out why!

Sales funnels are at the core of business strategies nowadays, whether your company sells B2C products or sells software, equipment, or services in the B2B market. Having the right sales channels will help you guide leads and prospects through the conversion process.

Companies of all sizes have tried hard to fasten the sales cycle and shorten the path that leads customers to get to know a brand to buy from it.

That’s understandable, considering that just a slight tweak in the sales funnel can positively affect a company’s bottom line.

Think about it: the less time a customer spends in your sales funnel, the more return on investment (ROI) he or she generated for you!

But how can you shorten the sales cycle without rushing your customers? Well, Live Chat can be a great way to engage with qualified prospects at the right time and with the right messages, helping to guide them faster towards the purchase.

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Live Chat combines the convenience and real-time experience expected by empowered audiences while also serving as a gatekeeper for your sales team. After all, not every customer on your website is mature enough to convert or start a conversation with sales reps.

In this blog post, we will explore how Live Chat can shorten the sales cycle and the importance of doing so. Read on to find more about the advantages of Live Chat in the sales funnel.

What is the sales cycle?

The sales cycle is the process that comprehends all the touchpoints between your company and potential customers, from the very first contact until the deal is closed.

The sales funnel describes the steps needed to create awareness around your brand, make your prospects considerate buying from you, and then convert. This process can be described through AIDA’s acronym (awareness, interest, desire, action).

The sales Funnel also includes your entire team’s effort to create and maintain interest in your products, engage; potential customers, answer their doubts, and finally sell to them.

How can Live Chat shorten the sales cycle?

Reducing the Sales Cycle is about helping customers find the information they need at any time and help them understand your product before you sell to them. Live Chat empowers the customer and relies on conversational commerce, which can help warm up your leads until they are ready to buy.

According to CrazyEgg;, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer Live Chat. Besides, Forrester; noted a 10% increase in the average order value when reviewing the sales from customers who used Live Chat before making a purchase, compared with those who did not use it.

A few ways Live Chat can help you shorten the Sales Cycle:

Faster feedback to marketing

Let’s say you have a two-month sales cycle time. That means it will take a lot more time for the marketing team to understand which marketing tactics worked or not for a given group of customers that converted in that period.

Live Chat gives you the possibility to get quicker feedback (in real-time) and then reinforce the marketing strategies that led to better results so far.

Efficiency for B2B Sales Teams

Live Chat is particularly great for B2B companies that wish to streamline their prospection activities since it works as a gatekeeper to filter qualified leads.

In the traditional sales model, the sales cycle is a back and forth process: the customer discovers the website and fills out contact forms. A sales representative then reaches out via e-mail or phone call without fully understanding the customer’s needs.

What if sales reps could make a more assertive approach towards prospects? Live Chat can undermine inefficiencies by helping your company start a personalized conversation with the customer.

A real-time chat combines the engagement level and immediacy of a phone call while still allowing your sales reps to manage more than one conversation at once.

That way, you can understand initial questions and objections in real-time before even having a more in-depth conversation with a client. Live Chat can replace some boring contact and assessment forms since initial client diagnosis can be made directly through the Chat, shortening the Sales Cycle.

Better conversion rates in e-commerce

When it comes to; e-commerce, it might sound tempting to assume that your visitors will browse your website on their own, find exactly what they want, be satisfied with the information provided, and then go straight to the checkout process. However, that’s not necessarily how it happens.

More often than not, customers will have doubts about products, payment methods, pricing, and shipping, sometimes leaving your website to search for other options and then eventually come back to make the purchase.

Incorporating proactive Live Chat in e-commerce websites creates a real-time space for customers to ask questions and find complementary information. Altogether, it can help reduce friction in the buying journey and move your customer quicker through the sales funnel.

Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Once a prospect is engaging via Live Chat, there is no need to put them through the pipelines of your funnel. Live Chat can help you skip them straight to the conversion stage.

Of course, there must be a good strategy behind the conversational flow. It can still be an effective way to reduce costs with social selling and other intrusive marketing channels, allowing you to skip a few steps usually necessary until the purchase.

Live Chat might seem like just a simple resource, but it can be a powerful tool to engage customers and reduce Customer Acquisition costs through the funnel.

Fasten upselling and cross-selling processes

Shortening the sales cycle is not about being pushy or rushing the customer to close a deal. In that sense, Live chat can help you build trust and provide customers with helpful information for their unique needs – resulting in a shorter and more efficient sales cycle.

Beyond optimizing the Sales Cycle for one service or another, Live Chat is useful to perform cross-selling and upselling strategies. With a proactive approach, your sales agents can offer complementary products related to customers’ interests and products they were initially looking for.

As a result, companies that use Live Chat tend to increase average order value and faster ROI in shorter periods.

Let’s say you run a media company, and a customer wants to sign up for a live conference you’re organizing. When he goes to the checkout page to pay for his badge, you could use Live Chat to send a personalized message recommending an essential content subscription with a discount. That logic applies to any industry and niche.

How are brands using Live Chat throughout the sales cycle?

Are you still skeptical about how much Live Chat can help shorten the sales cycle?; A study by AMA found that live chat can be used effectively throughout the entire customer journey.

The study shows that:

  • 29% of companies are using Live Chat for marketing awareness
  • 32% of companies are using Live Chat for early-stage sales development
  • 39% of companies are using Live Chat for the post-sales customer support

8 steps to use Live Chat to reduce the sales cycle and close more deals

As great as it is, Live Chat won’t just magically shorten your Sales Cycle from the moment you implement it. Your team should have a well-thought sales strategy that uses Live Chat as a key touchpoint with the customer, considering many variables.

Here are a few steps to make the best out of Live Chat for your sales cycle.

  1. Understand how long is your sales cycle

The basic step is to understand how long your company’s average sales cycle is. That might seem like an obvious recommendation, but many salespeople have never stopped to think about it.

It is important to consider different customer segments and products and then establish parameters of what your team considers a short or long sales cycle. From there, you can set up a strategy for improvements.

  1. Make sure your Live Chat is mobile-friendly

Live Chat is usually built for websites and with desktop navigation in mind. However, you should make sure your Live Chat is also easy to access through mobile devices, to offer your buyers a great; customer experience.

Customers who are ready to buy want to be able to buy quickly from mobile devices, and the same expectation exists when it comes to getting help or information through Live Chat.

  1. Bring different content formats to Live Chat

Many people think of corporate and e-commerce Live Chat as a text-only channel, when in fact, many Live Chat tools offer you the chance to incorporate video chat, voice chat, and formats like maps, forms, and spreadsheets embedded into conversations.

When you have different resources within the chat, it’s easier to target personalized messages and answer doubts from visitors, which ultimately can help them make purchase decisions faster.

  1. Rout customers to the right sales or support agents

There is no use adopting Live Chat to optimize your sales cycle if you’re routing customers to the wrong department or sales representative. Agents should be well-trained and equipped to handle specifics about products and services your offering, payment, and onboarding processes, pricing, etc.

That is something you should be careful about, especially if your company deals with extensive portfolios and many business units.

  1. Plan different steps of the conversation

If you truly want to use Live Chat to close deals faster, it’s important to have a well-mapped conversation flow for each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, conversion😉 and each of your buyer personas. Consider the most frequent doubts and stages for each stage in the journey and customer segments that you would like to reach.

What kinds of materials and information they would want to have access to? What is the best language for each buyer persona? Having those aspects in mind, you can better train sales agents and be prepared to guide customers to the next stage.

  1. Don’t keep Live Chat data in silos

This one is crucial. Live Chat might be an excellent starting point with a potential customer, but you need to make sure data generated from chat sessions are integrated into other sales management platforms.

Live Chat allows you to gather valuable information about the customer profile and his pain points, so it’s thoughtful to have Live Chat software integrated into Customer Relationship Management Platforms (CRM) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP), just so your sales and marketing team can understand the full picture about a customer and set the best strategy to follow up with them.

  1. Use Live Chat triggers to encourage customers to take action

There are many triggers you can use to send proactive messages in Live Chat and help customers move through the sales funnel faster. you can send messages about coupons, events, discounts, free items, and sensitive offers that are related to their profile.

  1. Have clear next steps

At last, it’s not enough just to show you have a great value proposition via Live Chat. To truly shorten the Sales Cycle, your team needs to take advantage of Live Chat to indicate CLEAR next steps for the customer.

Does he need a second round of conversation with sales agents? Does he need to complete an assessment? Does he need to proceed to the checkout page? Make sure you use Call to Actions (CTAs) and the right language to guide him through the next steps.

Conclusion

Are you interested in the potential of Live Chat to optimize your Sales Cycle? Maybe your company already uses Live Chat in Customer Support, or perhaps it’s still figuring out how to incorporate it in its website.

Either way, you can experiment with Live Chat little by little and then adjust it to your Sales operation.

Arena has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, with many features to help you personalize your sales approach.

Request your free trial today and see how Live Chat can optimize your sales funnel like never before.

Benefits of using Push Notifications for eCommerce

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No doubt, you have come across Push Notifications within your own daily business and e-commerce needs.

However, you may not be aware of how such a tool is used for communication updates, specifically by internet-based businesses and—most importantly—you may be unaware of the major benefits that push notifications can offer your own business and e-commerce. 

Here we will look at a brief history of what push notifications are, and how they best benefit e-commerce within the modern global market.

What exactly are Push Notifications?

First off, let’s be honest. To many people, many traditional web-based marketing formats have become outdated. Email marketing is more often than not regarded as “spam,” and SMS marketing is slowly being phased out by new, modern trends to match updated software and industry standards. 

Today, “push notifications” has now taken over as the most reliable and utilized tool for consistent, trusted updates for businesses to “get the word” out in all kinds of industries. For example, if you use online shopping apps, you’ve been using push notifications for the past few years and not been aware of how often.

Over the last few years, the practice of using push notifications as the most powerful and effective marketing tool chosen by online businesses to reach out to their demographic in real-time has become incredibly popular. 

Most companies now rely on the push notification method to keep their clientele updated on sales and premiums, ultimately driving more e-commerce conversions.

Thanks to their current popularity, push notifications capture almost double “open and click-through rates” as compared to email. The trend of app-based push notifications is now being followed by “Web Push Notifications,” also known as “Browser Push Notifications—messages or notifications that are delivered to the subscriber’s device in real-time. 

The notifications are sent even if the subscriber is not present at your website, making them all the more attractive within the world of e-commerce.

What are the benefits of Push Notifications for e-Commerce?

Just a brief look at some of the most current shopping trends impacting the world of e-commerce can give an idea of the importance of reaching your audience on a real-time basis. Just to list a few statistics, for example:

  • 67% of Millennials and 56% of Gen Xers prefer to shop online rather than in-store.
  • Baby Boomers spend 4 hours per week shopping online.
  • Men and women both report spending 5 hours per week shopping online.
  • When shopping online, 48% of online purchasers first turn to an eCommerce store that offers various products.

Of course, all mobile shopping apps first ask for a user’s permission to access their location. If they grant it, you’ll get a great opportunity to personalize the customer experience with location-specific push notifications—another incredible e-commerce benefit unheard of with traditional web marketing. Now, you can target users according to country, state or city.

Moreover, you can alert users to discounts or specials when they’re in a particular location. Push messages based on a user’s location can help you engage users with a high degree of personalization and relevance, while making the potential shopper of client feel as if their unique needs are bing specifically addressed—which, of course, they are.

Are there any drawbacks to Push Notifications?

While it wouldn’t be fair to say that there are any genuine “drawbacks” to utilizing push notifications for your e-commerce needs, it must be considered that some of the flexibility offered to potential customers can also undo some of the “direct” communication that notifications can provide.  

For example, it is crucial to remember that push notifications must be manually permitted by each person before your message is allowed to reach them.  In fact, Nearly one-third of users disable push notifications—and opting out, or ignoring, push notifications is becoming easier.

Updates to notification settings—like provisional authorization, push notification groupings, and notification center features—mean users have options for de-prioritizing your notifications.

Finally, it must also be noted that most people still prefer emails or ads. Nearly half of users (41%) say they prefer to receive marketing messages via email or mobile ads, while fewer than one in five (18%) prefer push notifications.

Of course, depending upon the generation of users pooled, these number can also reflect the growing popularity of push notifications, as more mobile-based shopping trends evolve.

Arena for all your push notification and e-commerce needs

If you are considering integrating push notifications into your e-commerce practices, and want to make it your goal to reach as many potential clients and customers are modern technology trends allow, then you can truly benefit from using Arena—a state-of-the-art cloud-based marketing platform that can be uniquely catered to all your marketing needs.

At Arena, our mission is to empower media companies to take back ownership of their audience from social networks and grow their community within their own website.

With our cloud-based e-commerce technologies, we enable publishers, media, and broadcasting companies to cover events such as news, sports, finance, and tech. Through powerful AI technology, Arena is capable of aggregate, curate, and distribute content to any device, anytime, anywhere.

Our fully customizable widgets help media companies to increase traffic, engagement and earn revenue. From bloggers to large enterprises, from Oscars to Super Bowl, Arena.im is ideal to manage any type of live experience.

Partnering with the largest media groups, Arena has grown rapidly in over 120 countries and reaches over 100 million monthly page views. Companies such as Microsoft, Turner Broadcasting, and DMG Media count on Arena to increase organic traffic, encourage engagement, and generate revenue directly from our platform.

If you are considering push notifications for your e-commerce needs, as well as utilizing all the new marketing trends as they are developed in real-time, then Arena.im may be perfect for you and your company.

You can also learn more about our state-of-the-art cloud-based software, as well as try it for yourself for free, at Arena.

How to build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

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

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

Build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

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

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

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

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

In this post, we will explore:

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

What is Live Chat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why using Live Chat in eCommerce

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

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

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

Fast customer support

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

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

Human touch

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

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

Non-intrusive

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

Integrated shopping experience

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

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

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

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

Improve Conversion rates

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

Make personalized offers

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

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

Optimize customer support costs

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

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

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

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

Examples of Live Chat in eCommerce and digital platforms

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

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

Amazon

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

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

PlayStation

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

Apple

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

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Shoply.tv

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

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How to derive even more value from Live Chat in eCommerce

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

1) Share customer feedback with marketing teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Understand where users come from

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

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

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

Want to try Live Chat on your eCommerce?

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

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

14 Ways Live Chat a Customer Service Game-Changer

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Live Chat is transforming customer care across many segments. Discover how this tool is leading a “micro revolution” to customer support and sales teams.

What are the main pillars that sustain the relationship between companies and customers? Let’s think for a second about brands that are known for excellent customer experience.

Digital apps, fintech, eCommerce, you name it. No matter the segment, it’s clear that successful brands offer more than great products, advertising, and content. They have a superior approach towards customer service and always try to make sure communication is dynamic and assertive. 

Live Chat is the ultimate tool to offer that. After all, in the age of instant communication, people are not willing to wait much time to have their questions answered. Besides, they increasingly want to count on omnichannel support.

Well, Live Chat is changing Customer Service in many ways. In this post, we’ll explore how this tool is boosting productivity and efficiency in Customer Service and customer satisfaction. 

The context behind Live Chat

For those who are not familiar with Live Chat, here goes a brief description of it.  Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to ask for support via instant messages directly on a company’s website or app while browsing products and viewing content.

Besides, some brands have integrated their Live Chat tools to other messaging platforms to provide a seamless support experience across different brand channels. 

By why exactly is Live Chat disrupting the customer care business? According to Forrester’s study,; 33% of consumers now expect to see Live Chat services offered on every website.

The same report says the number of U.S. online shoppers who use live Chat has increased from 38% to 58% in the last five years. 

Live Chat is mostly used in B2C businesses by support agents and Customer Care teams, but it can also be used by Customer Success and Sales teams in B2B companies.

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Why Live Chat can take Customer Experience to the next level

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much quicker and organic as it emulates conversation platforms. 

Why have the customers reaching for support through email or phone if you can help them in real-time through Live Chat? Here are a few reasons Live Chat is changing customer service in companies. 

1) Enhancing brand experience

It’s no secret customers are more demanding when it comes to customer experience. They have become used to personalized messages and offers in every aspect of their lives, and thus they have high expectations regarding customer service. 

According to Salesforce, 80% of customers believe brand experience is just as important as a brand’s products or services. Another study by Capgemini shows that the same percentage of customers are willing to spend more money to have better customer service. 

Following this logic, customer service can be the central element to differentiate your brand from the competition.

2) Providing fast responses

A few years ago, it might have been OK to make customers wait a couple of days to get responses to their requests via phone or email. That is no longer the truth. 

A study from Hubspot says 90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have a query. 

Having Live Chat on your website or app gives you the ability to answer queries in real-time. In addition, Live Chat has proven to provide higher customer satisfaction rates than channels such as phone, email, and social media. 

3) Decreasing resolution time 

From a business perspective, Live Chat also has helped companies streamline their customer support processes and optimize customer care strategies. 

With Live Chat, you can route customers to specific departments and agents according to the keywords they use in the chat, for instance, avoiding repeated communication across different support channels. Because it offers instant communication, Live Chat can potentially decrease the average answer and requests resolution time. 

4) Boosting brands Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Agile and effective customer service is the key to drive customer satisfaction. If you want to improve your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Live Chat is the way to go. Offering real-time, personalized support shows that your company is truly customer-centric;. That is why many companies notice better retention rates after using this type of software.

5) Non-intrusive communication

The best thing about Live Chat is that it happens in an inviting and non-intrusive way. Unlike emails that flood up your mailbox or phone calls from support agents that happen at the worst timing, Live Chat offers an easy way for customers to get done with your requests – in the best timing for them.

It is estimated that 46% of consumers prefer live chat over email and social media, for example. 

Live Chat empowers customers in many ways, allowing multiple interactions on a single web interface. That is vital in today’s digital landscape. According to a study by E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer live chat to other channels precisely because it allows them to continue performing other tasks.

6) Using Live Chat Data to improve overall business 

Apart from the; benefits Live Chat brings to daily tasks of customer service, it can serve as a strategic tool to enhance your brand’s marketing, sales, and product strategies.

Because Live Chat provides detailed insights about your website visitors’ journey, it can offer valuable data to help companies grow their bottom lines. 

You can use Live Chat customer insights for:

  • Mapping the customer journey and identifying frequent complaints
  • Personalizing your conversations according to different buyer personas
  • Routing chats to the right department or team
  • Feeding CRM and other data management tools, like Customer Data Platform
  • Improving support agents training according to customers needs and response
  • Improving customer service important KPIs, like first response time and average queue time

7) Understanding where customers come from

One of the challenges for online players is to understand how their Customer Care efforts connect to online conversions. 

Some Live Chat tools allow you to connect the dots between chat sessions and the marketing sources that led the customer to the chat, whether it was a campaign, a disclaimer on the website, or a web search.  Some tools allow you to integrate Live Chat to Google Analytics, for instance, and see a bigger picture of what led customers to chat sessions. 

Such data is important to determine if your marketing channels are actually bringing people to your page and how they are connected to your Live Chat. 

8)  Increasing conversion rates

The study by Forrester shows that consumers who use Live Chat are 2.8x more likely to convert to a sale than those who don’t.  By allowing users to get support without moving to other channels, Live Chat makes buying decisions much quicker and can boost conversion rates.

Placing Live Chat across different touchpoints on a website can also be a good idea. Some companies are using Live Chat in their checkout pages, which helps to solve doubts about payments and shipping, for instance, and thus reduces cart abandonment rates.  

9) Avoiding repetitive tasks for customers and support agents

With a Live Chat customer service tool integrated into your CRM or Data Management Platform (DMP), your team can access customer data or notes from previous interactions to assist customers. That way, you save time that could otherwise be wasted in repetitive conversations. 

Actually, 72% of customers expect customer support agents to know their details like buying history and detailed information — without asking for them.

10) Increasing customers Lifetime Value (LTV) 

Having a sustainable repeat customer base is the dream of every brand, right? Research shows that 63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site. That is why Live Chat is boosting Customer Life Time Value (LTV) among companies that use it, adding value not just to customer service, but to the whole business. 

11) Cross-selling and upselling products 

Around 33% of the money spent online comes from repeat customers and they generally spend 3 times as much as one time shoppers. Once you build a loyal community of shoppers around your brand, you have the chance to offer proactive communication through Live Chat whenever they access your website. 

Your team can start the conversation, suggesting personalized offers and products through the chat according to the customers buying history and interests, leveraging upselling and cross-selling rates. 

12) Increasing customer engagement

With Live Chat, you are likely to see a significant rise in customer engagement. Because Live Chat emulates messaging apps, it makes interactions with brands more fluid and organic. 

Besides, you can add layers of engagement to Live Chat by adopting a few features in it, such as:

  • Co-browsing: Co-browsing, in the context of Live Chat, is when a customer and a support agent browse a page together during a chat session. It delivers a guided experience and it’s a great way to guide customers through form fill-ups and complex applications, for instance. 
  • Vídeo and Voice Chat: Customers sometimes have requests that are complex or take too long to explain by text. With that in mind, some companies are adding Vídeo and Voice Chat to their Live Chat experience. Not only can it help solve queries quicker, but it also makes interactions more dynamic and personal. 

13) Increasing productivity in Customer Care

At last, another triumph of Live Chat is to leverage Customer Care productivity. It reduces the queue time and enables faster resolution of issues, but beyond that, it allows agents to handle multiple chats at the same time. 

As a result, Live Chat can boost important productivity KPIs such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, number of chats answered, and so on. 

14) Human touch

In the era of hyper-automation and chatbots;, a human approach to customer experience might give you extra points in the relationship with customers. Even though automated emails and chatbots; can benefit customer support, users have shown that they want to interact with humans whenever possible.

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

Conclusion

As we have seen, Live Chat has the potential to change Customer Care across many different industries, and your company shouldn’t be left behind. 

Live Chat can optimize many aspects of a digital business, and executives are increasingly aware of its importance. A 2018 survey from Bold 360 found out that 71% of respondents believe Live Chat will surpass traditional customer service communication channels by 2021.

If your organization has not yet incorporated Live Chat into customer service, it’s time to change that.

Arena; has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, and the best thing is that you can try it for free. 
Click here to access the free trial of our Live Chat and start answering your customers quickly right now!

20 Reasons to Use an eCommerce Live Blog

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Everything you need to know about Live Blog for e-commerce is here. This practical solution for real-time engagement provides better customer experience and brings many benefits to the company — from audience growth to an increase in revenue.

In this connected era, people have become accustomed to a certain speed of consuming content on the internet. They want to know about things as they are happening at the moment. For this reason, Live Blog has been gaining more attention.

This tool is an alternative to provide interactive, real-time content to a brand’s audience. Rather than publishing static content, a Live Blog platform facilitates several sources in a single post. In other words, it pieces together information like images and inputs on social media.

A Live Blog solution is perfect for a strategy that aims regular updates posting, live events coverage, and breaking news coverage. Furthermore, Live Blog in the year 2020 has been used as an audience engagement tool for guaranteed success.

Curious, right? Keep reading to learn more about what Live Blog is, how it impacts e-commerce, and why you should use Live Blog for your e-commerce.

What is Live Blog?

The answer to this question can be summed up like this:

Live Blog is a type of platform where content can be published in real-time.

Even though the format remains a blog post, it works as an interactive piece, putting together information from several places online — images, videos, tweets, etc.

It’s an excellent tool for brands and companies that work with a high number of live events. Instead of writing insights about it for the Blog only after it’s finished, it’s possible to do it while it’s taking place. Moreover, it’s great for breaking news coverage as well.

Seeing it can create high-quality content from different sources, it becomes an advantage for both parts: company and visitor. That’s because the person would have to go all over the internet and do a thorough search to find all the information they now have in a unique blog post.

Reaction buttons, comments thread, sound notifications, and interactive pools are just a few possibilities with a Live Blog structure. All of these features make your content more interactive, thereby increasing audience engagement.

But how does Live Blog make a difference when we talk about an e-commerce company?

It helps in many ways, either increasing sales and revenue or improving customer retention and relationships. But, before we dive into the reasons why you should use Live Blog in your e-commerce, here’s a bit more about this new live commerce notion.

The concept of live commerce

With the advent of this publishing technology, many other things have started to change and modernize too. Online shopping is one of those things. Since it’s possible to work with live content now, e-commerce has begun to find ways to apply some Live Blog strategies to their benefit.

Thus, the concept of live commerce gained life. China is already a leader in this method of sales. If you look it up, you’ll see that most of their e-commerce is done through live content, primarily live streaming.

However, in the US and Europe, people still tend to turn to social media to learn more about products and services.

People love when things are done in the simplest way possible, and live streaming of products brings the benefit of the one-click purchase. Suppose the company already has a register of the customer with the required information (like name, email, card number, and address). In that case, they can easily buy anything they want from live content.

Overall, there are many benefits a Live Blog can bring to your e-commerce company. These are 20 (yes, TWENTY) reasons to acquire a Live Blog solution to your brand.

1. Be up-to-date

We live in an era of technology and immediacy. People don’t want to wait until the end of the day to hear about the news. They want information as it is occurring. Having that in mind, acquiring a Live Blog platform will showcase your business as modern and trendy.

It’ll always be on top of the news, sharing brand-new content and displaying products as soon as they come out.

2. Real-time engagement

Since publishing happens in real-time, it means everyone online at the moment will be able to see your content and talk about it while things are happening. The system of a Live Blog has features for real-time comments, shares, and reaction buttons. As content is being updated, people are talking about it.

3. Use Live Chat

When we talk about real-time engagement, there’s no way to leave out the use of Live Chat. Customers can interact with the brand and with each other to talk about the content, products, or events occurring right there and then.

More than that, a Live Chat can also be used for immediate customer support, marketing, and sales strategies. This research shows that companies that use Live Chat have a 48% increase in revenue and 40% in overall conversion rates.

4. User-generated content

Because a Live Blog can collect content from several sources, it can also use content that the users themselves are sharing. This approach connects the audience and makes them eager to share more and mention your brand online.

This is another reason to create hashtags in your online community. That way, people will share using your hashtag, and every content will have a category you can put under to make posts more organized inside the Blog.

5. Create a human connection

These factors, such as real-time engagement, sharing user-generated content, and communicating over Live Chat, make it easier to create a brand that’s closer to the audience. It builds a more human connection.

After all, the editorial team is a bit more vulnerable when they work with live content—going live means more significant chances of making mistakes and having unforeseen situations. Thus, the audience will see how the brand behaves in true-to-life scenarios — making the brand more sympathetic.

6. Improve customer relationship

When you build a human connection with the public, you get as a bonus, the improvement of customer relationships. Live Blog is highly associated with bringing a better customer experience.

You are sharing great content and creating a place where customers can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions with you and all other visitors of the page.

7. Watch live streaming

Like any other blog, a Live Blog can also share video content. Only in this case are we talking mainly about live streamings.

They are a big plus to increase sales. Remember when we mentioned China earlier on? While in the US, customers mostly use social media for product information, they go straight to live streaming in China.

If people can see the product being used in a real situation, with no cuts or edits, they are more likely to complete purchase since they know it’s “the real deal.” That’s why, among all these other reasons, e-commerce can benefit from a Live Blog acquisition.

8. Increase sales revenue

Simultaneously, the more people are connected and interested in your content, search engines like Google notice and value this. SEO tactics make a difference to rank your posts, but so does audience engagement. Because of that, your e-commerce will gain a boost in revenue.

Also, it’s possible to work with embedded links and promotional codes inside a Live Blog. It is increasing, even more, your revenue.

9. Launch new products

The release of new products will be exciting with a live stream and real-time interaction from the audience. Can you picture showing that brand-new item and capturing real-time reactions? This is doable with a Live Blog.

People love discovering new products, and they look forward to trying it as soon as possible. So providing them a live stream, with a real person showing what it is about and how it works will be a motive to keep them on your page — and interacting — for a long time.

11. Perform interviews

In the same way, you can use live content to show new products. You can use it to perform interviews. Whether it’s with the brand’s CEO or someone famous, that can be somewhat related to the product.

While the interview is happening on your blog, people can comment and even ask questions for the person being interviewed during the event.

10. Q&A panel

Likewise, question-and-answer panels are an excellent way to catch people’s attention. The audience loves it when they are heard and have their doubts answered. Nowadays, this mostly happens on social media since personal profiles seem more reachable than any other digital media.

However, with Live Blog, you will no longer need to depend on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. You just need to make sure to have a strategy that will lead traffic to your Blog, and then all your content, live streams, and event coverage will take place in a unique platform.

12. Branding

When a brand starts being seen as an expert in the field, things tend to only get better for the business. Sharing live content makes you look updated and concerned about bringing the top news for your public.

A branding strategy includes demonstrating the brand’s position in the market, purpose, and value proposition. All of which will be presented along with the content approach.

13. Dynamic communication

Because it’s simple to interact and share the content on a Live Blog page, the communication between customer and brand becomes more dynamic.

Liveblogging allows the delivery of interactive content at all times. Instead of having a static page, the public can feel like they are a part of what’s happening.

14. Make users spend more time on your page

With real-time engagement and having their actions show up on the streaming feed, the website visitors get so involved in the experience they end up spending more time on your page than they usually would if you were presenting static content.

Additionally, a Live Blog can be used as an area where people can go to talk about overall subjects. It’s up to the company to decide what topic makes the most sense for the business. For example, if you’re in the sports field, your blog can become a place where fans come to share their ideas on games and teams.

15. SEO Optimization

Even if the content is being shared in real-time, you can still work with optimizing it to have greater reach in research tools. First of all, the time people spend on your website already counts as an SEO indicator. That’s because it makes Google recognize your page as important, giving it a better ranking on keyword searches.

With Arena, all the hard work is done for you. This means even if you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll be able to; work on the optimization for your pages.

16. Boost conversion rates

The interaction and real-time conversations happen not only between content and readers or readers among themselves but also between brand and customer. In particular, by using Live Chat, customers can easily talk to an attendant to better understand the product, discounts, and shipping information.

17. Create an online community

By using this dynamic communication tool, people will start to give your blog more attention. Just like you can create a community on social media through hashtag use, you can do the same thing (or even better) in a Live Blog structure.

For instance, in collaboration with FoxSports, Arena’s live blog solution gave them a place where basketball fans could like and share updating posts about the NBA.

18. Make the audience more loyal

When you provide high-quality content, readers notice it. Even more so when they can easily interact and talk about it. Moreover, have a consistent and coherent content strategy to offer personalized themes for your audience.

More than that, listen to their feedback—customers like being heard and having their suggestions implemented. Keep an eye out for their comments, and make sure to answer them.

19. Customer retention

Providing a great customer experience is what makes a customer stick to a brand. Building a customer loyal is side-by-side with increasing customer retention. For both cases, your strategy will be to give them updated content, answer questions, solve problems, and give them a voice to be part of the overall experience.

Of course, personalized notes and emails are essential for this approach. However, Live Blogs are so connected with the customer experience that it plays a big part in making retention happen.

20. Promote user interaction

It’s more than the company creating a connection with the audience. It’s about creating an online community and making customers interact with each other. Liveblogging enables users to pose questions and have other users answer them.

Readers can also reply to pools, leave comments on your page, and retweet your content to their Twitter profile directly from the blog post page. All of this is done without the need to promote interaction, but it’s still worth applying some CTAs in association with the content.

How to acquire a live blog solution?

Arena has everything you need. Our Live Blog solution will help you stand out from competitors in the market and grow your audience with minimum effort.

In order to get the best Live Blog tool for your business, some factors must be taken into account. They include:

  • usability for the audience and editorial team
  • integration and features
  • flexibility to run on multiple devices
  • data privacy and safety

Of course, Arena offers all of that and even more. You can find out more about our platform by accessing the Live Blog tool’s FREE TRIAL. This is an opportunity you can’t refuse!

31 Live Chat Black Friday statistics you must see

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

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

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

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

How Live Chat can impact your business

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

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

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

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

We can prove it:

Live Chat statistics you need to know

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

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

Customer support and satisfaction

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

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

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

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

Lead generation & Conversion rates

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

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

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

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

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

Customer experience and engagement

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Revenue stats

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

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

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

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

Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support: 

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

Response time

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

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

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

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

Live Chat vs. Chatbot

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

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

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

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

On the other hand:

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

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

The future of Live Chat

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

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

Further on, an interesting fact is that:

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

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

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

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

Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat

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

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

10 Tips to offer Powerful Black Friday Customer Experiences

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

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

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

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

The impact of COVID-19 on Black Friday 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The importance of Being Omnichannel

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

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

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

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

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

3. Live Chat for Black Friday

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

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

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

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

4. Using Engagement and Interaction in Real-time

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

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

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

The Importance of Being Available 24/7

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

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

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

5. Live Blog for Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Paying close attention to different types of audiences

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

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

8. Proactive approaches

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

9. Selling experiences, not products

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

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

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

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

10. Best Free Tools To Create A Powerful Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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