Category Archives: Group Chat

What is live stream eCommerce or Live Shopping

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Live stream ecommerce is the next big opportunity for ecommerce companies to drive more revenue. Live stream ecommerce is a way to transform online shopping into an entertaining event. Typically, a live stream ecommerce event has a specific (e.g., “new fashion”) and takes place live. It is appealing to customers because it lets them see the products in detail. In some cases, ecommerce brands are working with influencers to make their events more entertaining.

What Companies Are Using Live Stream Ecommerce?

Live stream ecommerce is an emerging way to engage customers that several companies are already using effectively.

  • Facebook. In May 2021, Facebook announced “Live Shopping Fridays,” a series of events featuring Clinique, Abercrombie & Fitch, ZOX, and Sephora products. Each event focused on a different theme: Glow Up, New Fashion Finds, and Self Care Spotlight. The live ecommerce event was each scheduled for 90 minutes.
  • Walmart. In December 2020, the retail giant partnered with TikTok creators to promote shopping. While Walmart did not disclose how many sales it earned, it grew its TikTok audience by 25%, according to TechCrunch.

So far, fashion and beauty brands have been the leaders in live stream ecommerce. It is only a matter of time before other ecommerce companies find a way to leverage this opportunity to grow.

Why Live Stream Ecommerce Matters

Offering a live stream ecommerce experience to customers is crucial because it creates an experience. Historically, ecommerce companies have struggled to create memorable events. Sure, ecommerce companies create annual sales events like Amazon Prime Day. However, discount-driven promotions have their limitations. You might not want to train your customers to expect a discount if you offer premium quality products.

By offering a live stream ecommerce event to customers, you can compete against in-person shopping more effectively. When a shopper goes to a store in person, they can touch and feel products. They can see the quality of the materials, colors, and more. In the ecommerce world, it is more challenging to encourage customers to look at products so deeply.

Offering a live stream ecommerce event is a way to make shopping at your ecommerce more exciting.

Tips for planning your first live stream ecommerce event

1. Choose a focus for the event

To make a live stream ecommerce event appealing to customers, it has to be specific. Here are a few ideas you can use to start your brainstorming process.

  • Emphasize new products. Novelty is a tried and tested way to appeal to customers. Ask yourself: what new products or styles can we highlight?
  • Seasonal trends. Look for seasonal opportunities to inform your event. A lingerie ecommerce company might schedule an event in early February to align with Valentine’s Day. An ecommerce brand aimed at school-age children might offer a “back to school” event in late August.
  • Limited edition theme. Your company might have “limited editions” or premium versions of products. Consider promoting these events in your live stream event.

2. Look for influencers to invite

A live stream ecommerce event typically features an influencer. There are a few options to choose an influencer for the event. If your company founder has a large personal following on social media, you might be able to feature them in the event. In other cases, inviting an outside influencer to your campaign is a smart idea.

There are several platforms you can use to find influencers relevant to your campaign. Use the following tools to search for influencers.

  •  Followerwonk. Looking for Twitter influencers? Followerwonk can speed up the process of searching for Twitter users with a significant following.
  •  Klear. This tool makes it easy to search for influencers by audience size, skills, location, audience gender, and other factors.
  • TikTok Creator Marketplace. Operated by TikTok, the marketplace makes it easier to search for content creators with a significant audience on TikTok.

Once you find a relevant influencer, negotiate the details of the event. For example, you might offer a fee to the influencer and a percentage of sales linked to the event.

3. Promote the event

Promoting the live stream ecommerce event is essential. Start by promoting the event to your audience of past customers and followers on social media. If you are working with an influencer, ask them to drive attendance to the event. As a rule of thumb, give yourself at least two weeks to promote the event.

4. Offer something unique to live stream event attendees

Your customers are busy and might not immediately see the appeal of a live stream ecommerce event. Make your event exciting by offering something unique that they cannot get anywhere else. You might decide to offer a discount code valid for 24 hours to those who attend the event. Alternately, you might offer customized products (e.g., get your name printed on the product) to people who attend the event.

Ask your influencer for ideas to make the event appealing as well. They already know what types of content works with their audience. For instance, they might commit to releasing a unique new video to people who attend the live stream event.

5. Use live chat in the event

There are two ways live chat makes a live stream ecommerce event more exciting.

  • Encourage Community. Offering live chat makes it easy for customers to interact with each other and ask questions. Your guest influencer can answer questions during the event and change their approach. For example, guests might ask to see the product from different angles or see a product in a close-up. Responding to these requests during the event makes it more engaging.
  • Boost Sales By Answering Questions. As customers watch the event, they are probably going to have plenty of questions. For example, customers might ask about clothing sizes and shipping times. Make it easy for customers to ask these questions in a live chat. Every customer question you answer increases the chances of a sale.

6. Choose your live stream ecommerce platform

There are two ways to run a live stream ecommerce platform: run it on your website or use a third-party platform. Each approach has its pros and cons.

  • Using Your Website. You can use your website as a live stream ecommerce platform. For example, stream video from your website using YouTube or other tools and enhance the experience with Arena Live Chat. This approach is an excellent choice because potential customers are less likely to get distracted during the event. The disadvantage is that it takes some time to set up. In addition, you should also double-check that your website can handle a significant increase in web traffic during the event.
  • Using A Third Party Website. The other option is to use a third-party website like Shoply, Facebook or TikTok. This option is a good choice if your website is not ready to handle a large amount of traffic. Shoply leverages Arena’s API to offer a great ecommerce customer experience. The downsides in choosing social network platforms are significant – live stream event attendees might get distracted by other updates on the platform and drift away from your event.

Get Ready For Your First Live Stream Ecommerce Event

Planning a successful live stream ecommerce event takes some time and effort to organize. Fortunately, adding live chat to your website is fast and straightforward. Sign up for a free trial of Arena Live Chat. Once you have a live chat in place, you will be on your way to planning your first live ecommerce event.

Live Chat: a great way to broaden online media reach

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Does your online media brand need a larger audience? A large and growing audience is the foundation of every successful online media brand. Yet, many brands neglect the power of a live chat platform to grow their reach. That’s a mistake because your audience doesn’t want to consume information passively.

Where Will The Conversation Happen?

Whether you cover a major political event, a breaking business story, or a sports game, your audience is talking about that event. People are going to share their thoughts on social media, text, email, and beyond. As an online media brand, you can approach conversations in two ways.

The traditional or “broadcast only” approach to the audience is the most common choice. With this line of thinking, your audiences have no way to interact with each other on your website. That means conversations almost always happen somewhere else, like Twitter or Facebook. That means people are spending less time on your platform.

The inclusive approach to conversation is the better way because it builds your reach with a live chat platform. Imagine covering a significant event like the annual CES event – a must-attend event for the electronics industry. By giving your audience a live chat experience, they are more likely to stay on your website. There is also a good chance they will invite their friends and family to join the conversation.

Live Chat Strategies To Increase Your Reach

Use these strategies to make the most of your live chat sessions. Pick and choose among the different strategies for the best results until you find the right approach for a chat news live stream that appeals to your audience.

Reach Building Strategy 1: Become a community hub

Think about the community hubs in your city. For example, parents and families regularly gather in parks for their children’s sports games. Everybody knows when and where the game will happen, week after week. Church services have a similar community dynamic – everybody attending a service knows when to show up on Sunday morning.

To apply the community hub strategy to your brand’s live chat news , use the following steps.

  • Pick a consistent day and time. If people always know when to attend your live chat session, they can add it to their calendar and look forward to it.
  • Focus on one segment of your audience. When you first get started, don’t try to appeal to everybody in your audience. For example, you might run a sports-focused live chat on Mondays and a stock market-focused live chat on Wednesdays.

Offering a small, focused live chat experience makes it easier for your audience to feel connected with others who share their interests.

Reach Building Strategy 2: Invite influencers as guests

Collaboration with others is one of the best ways to grow your audience. Specifically, consider inviting relevant influencers to your live chat. Encourage each influencer to promote the event to their audience. Over time, you will have the opportunity to grow your reach.

To make the most of the influencer-themed chat news live stream event, keep the following tips in mind.

  • Brand Relevance. Inviting a fashion influencer to a business-themed news website probably would not make sense. Avoid the temptation to invite any influencer you come across with a large audience. Instead, use tools like Klear or Upfluence to identify relevant influencers. In particular, look for similarities in audience demographics. If your online media site audience is mainly women over the age of 30, seek out an influencer relevant to that audience.
  • Influencer Audience Size. Only a tiny fraction of an influencer’s audience will join your live chat session. As a rule of time, use the 1% rule. Assume that 1% of the influencer’s followers will join your event. That means 1,000 live chat participants if the influencer has an audience of 100,000.
  • Make The Influencer Feel Special Before, During, and After The Event. Making the influencer feel special doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, you could assign them an assistant during the live chat session and dedicated tech support. After the event, give them a report on how the event went covering how many people attended the event. You might also want to send a gift to the influencer to thank them for their participation.

If the influencer asks to be paid for participating in the live chat, consider the request. Before agreeing, ask them about previous collaborations they have participated in.

Reach Building Strategy 3: Offer a family-friendly environment

The Internet is not always a friendly place for families and children. As a publisher, this sorry state of affairs is an opportunity for thoughtful publishers. Your website can become a destination for parents concerned about appropriate Internet use by offering well-moderated live chat news sessions.

A significant number of families are already applying restrictions of some kind on how their children use social media, mobile devices, and other services. A March 2020 survey of 3640 people found that 72% of US parents use parental controls on screen time. The same survey found that 49% of parents look at call records and texts on their child’s smartphone. Publishers who create moderated live chat sessions can build their reach by appealing to these audiences.

With Arena Live Chat, you have operations to keep live chat sessions family-friendly. Profanity moderation is built in. In addition, it is easy for moderators to remove participants who do not follow guidelines quietly.

Reach Building Strategy 4: Exclusive chat experiences for subscribers

In some cases, your goal may not be maximizing pageviews or raw audience numbers. For instance, you might focus on promoting exclusive programs for subscribers. For example, the New York Times offers offline access to content for paying subscribers, among other benefits.

Consider setting up exclusive live chat news experiences for your paying subscribers. For example, you might offer pre-game interviews with VIP athletes right before a major game. To make the live chat experience more enticing, consider limiting attendance to a small group of 50-100 so each participant can be heard.

Start Expanding Your Online Media Reach Today

Getting started with Arena Live Chat is easy. You can install it on your website in less than 10 minutes. You can get started for free and start building your reach with a free trial. That’s enough time to hold a few events and grow your audience.

How publishers increase revenue with Live Chat news

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The news business model needs to evolve to take advantage of the digital opportunity. This shift is vital for two business reasons: market share and revenue predictability. That’s why more publishers are using live chat news to stay connected with their audience.

The Top 4 Revenue Challenges Facing The News Business

Increased competition from non-traditional news sources and social media is just one of the news business’s problems. Many publishers are struggling to earn online revenue.

  • Minimal Digital Advertising Revenue. Local TV stations in the US only earned about 7% of their total advertising revenue from digital in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
  • Election Year Dependence. Many local TV stations tend to earn significantly more revenue in election years than non-election years. That means broadcasters struggle to maintain staffing levels and quality as they ride the revenue rollercoaster.
  • Slowing Retransmission Fee Growth. Over the past decade, local TV stations earned billions from retransmission fees (i.e., fees paid by cable and satellite companies to carry local channels). While this revenue source may continue to grow this decade, it is likely to grow at a much slower pace.
  • The Rise of Streaming Services. Two streaming services – Netflix and Disney+ – have developed significant audiences in the US and other countries. Every hour customers spend on a streaming service means less attention and revenue for other publishers.

Other news publishers in print, radio, and other media are facing challenges with declining revenue. For example, newspaper circulation in the US has been falling steadily since 1990. Fortunately, some newspapers like the New York Times and Wall St Journal have recovered some ground with digital offerings.

Why Offering Live Chat Boosts Revenue For Publishers  

Publishing quality news content online is no longer enough to attract audiences and earn revenue. That’s not the only challenge. There is an increasing challenge with misinformation and fake news more than ever before. For example, 11% of Americans strongly believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” in 2019. By thoughtfully engaging audiences, publishers can achieve two important goals at the same time.

Offering live chat news gives your audience additional reasons to stay on your website and keep coming back. By increasing audience engagement, you can boost your advertising revenue. Best of all, this added revenue requires minimal investments in technology and employee effort.

In addition to growing revenue, publishers can use live chat news events to engage their audiences in thoughtful conversations. A well-considered live chat news event can be done correctly and inspire your audience to think more deeply and become more engaged citizens.

Traditionally, publishers have focused their effort on creating and presenting the news. To engage today’s digital audience, we need to invite the public into the conversation. You can use a live chat news approach to keep audiences engaged.

Getting Started With A Chat News Live Stream

Adding a live chat to news coverage is simple. Follow these guides to install the Arena live chat platform on your website.

Once you have Arena Live Chat installed, you can test your new live chat news internally. For example, you could simulate coverage of an election for 15 minutes with colleagues. During the test, invite some people to participate as journalists while others play the role of the public. Experiencing both sides of a live chat platform is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the features.

Three Tips To Make The Most of Live Chat News

Launching a live chat platform on your news website only takes a few minutes. Keeping your audience engaged takes more practice. To run successful live chat sessions, keep the following tips in mind.

  • Experiment with different times. Different segments of your audience will be available to participate at different times. For example, you might be able to connect with a business news audience during the morning of a major IPO (initial public offering) in the stock market. In that situation, inviting investing experts to add to the conversation can make your chat news live stream more interesting. If attendance and engagement numbers are low, try the other tips in this section to improve the quality of the session.
  • Enforce your standards. When you open your virtual doors for a chat news live stream, troublemakers might appear. For example, some people might start cursing in the live chat. To quickly handle those problems, use Arena’s Live Chat, which includes profanity moderation.
  • Prepare questions in advance. Even live events like elections and sports games have slow moments. In these moments, your chat news live stream might go quiet. If the chat stays quiet for too long, your audience might leave. Preparing 5-6 questions in advance of running the live chat session will solve this problem.

Is Live Chat News Right For You?

Live chat news is a proven way to make news coverage more engaging. However, it will not help every organization. Three situations make it more challenging to make live chat news work.

  • You lack an online audience. For live chat news to work, you need a reasonably large online audience. If your company focuses exclusively on non-digital formats like print, radio, and TV, live chat news might not suit you.
  • Technical Skills. Installing live chat news is relatively fast and straightforward. Many customers can install it in just five minutes. That said, it does take some time to learn all of the features. If your staff cannot learn additional digital skills, live chat news may not be a good fit.

Offering a live chat news stream is an excellent strategy for publishers with active websites and a desire to build your digital advertising revenue.

Start Your First Live Chat Event For Free

You can start a live chat event in less than an hour by signing up for the Arena Live Chat free trial. In a few weeks, you’ll have plenty of time to run a few live chat news events and discover if Arena is right for you.

Does your online media brand need a larger audience? A large and growing audience is the foundation of every successful online media brand. Yet, many brands neglect the power of a live chat platform to grow their reach. That’s a mistake because your audience doesn’t want to consume information passively.

Where Will The Conversation Happen?

Whether you cover a major political event like an event, a breaking business story, or a sports game, your audience is talking about that event. People are going to share their thoughts on social media, text, email, and beyond. As an online media brand, you can approach conversations in two ways.

The traditional or “broadcast only” approach to the audience is the most common choice. With this line of thinking, your audiences have no way to interact with each other on your website. That means conversations almost always happen somewhere else, like Twitter or Facebook. That means people are spending less time on your platform.

The inclusive approach to conversation is the better way because it builds your reach with a live chat platform. Imagine covering a significant event like the annual CES event – a must-attend event for the electronics industry. By giving your audience a live chat experience, they are more likely to stay on your website. There is also a good chance they will invite their friends and family to join the conversation.

Live Chat Strategies To Increase Your Reach

Use these strategies to make the most of your live chat sessions. Pick and choose among the different strategies for the best results until you find the right approach for a chat news live stream that appeals to your audience.

Reach Building Strategy 1: Become a community hub

Think about the community hubs in your city. For example, parents and families regularly gather in parks for their children’s sports games. Everybody knows when and where the game will happen, week after week. Church services have a similar community dynamic – everybody attending a service knows when to show up on Sunday morning.

To apply the community hub strategy to your brand’s live chat news , use the following steps.

  • Pick a consistent day and time. If people always know when to attend your live chat session, they can add it to their calendar and look forward to it.
  • Focus on one segment of your audience. When you first get started, don’t try to appeal to everybody in your audience. For example, you might run a sports-focused live chat on Mondays and a stock market-focused live chat on Wednesdays.

Offering a small, focused live chat experience makes it easier for your audience to feel connected with others who share their interests.

Reach Building Strategy 2: Invite influencers as guests

Collaboration with others is one of the best ways to grow your audience. Specifically, consider inviting relevant influencers to your live chat. Encourage each influencer to promote the event to their audience. Over time, you will have the opportunity to grow your reach.

To make the most of the influencer-themed chat news live stream event, keep the following tips in mind.

  • Brand Relevance. Inviting a fashion influencer to a business-themed news website probably would not make sense. Avoid the temptation to invite any influencer you come across with a large audience. Instead, use tools like Klear or Upfluence to identify relevant influencers. In particular, look for similarities in audience demographics. If your online media site audience is mainly women over the age of 30, seek out an influencer relevant to that audience.
  • Influencer Audience Size. Only a tiny fraction of an influencer’s audience will join your live chat session. As a rule of time, use the 1% rule. Assume that 1% of the influencer’s followers will join your event. That means 1,000 live chat participants if the influencer has an audience of 100,000.
  • Make The Influencer Feel Special Before, During, and After The Event. Making the influencer feel special doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, you could assign them an assistant during the live chat session and dedicated tech support. After the event, give them a report on how the event went covering how many people attended the event. You might also want to send a gift to the influencer to thank them for their participation.

If the influencer asks to be paid for participating in the live chat, consider the request. Before agreeing, ask them about previous collaborations they have participated in.

Reach Building Strategy 3: Offer a family-friendly environment

The Internet is not always a friendly place for families and children. As a publisher, this sorry state of affairs is an opportunity for thoughtful publishers. Your website can become a destination for parents concerned about appropriate Internet use by offering well-moderated live chat news sessions.

A significant number of families are already applying restrictions of some kind on how their children use social media, mobile devices, and other services. A March 2020 survey of 3640 people found that 72% of US parents use parental controls on screen time. The same survey found that 49% of parents look at call records and texts on their child’s smartphone. Publishers who create moderated live chat sessions can build their reach by appealing to these audiences.

With Arena Live Chat, you have operations to keep live chat sessions family-friendly. Profanity moderation is built in. In addition, it is easy for moderators to remove participants who do not follow guidelines quietly.

Reach Building Strategy 4: Exclusive chat experiences for subscribers

In some cases, your goal may not be maximizing pageviews or raw audience numbers. For instance, you might focus on promoting exclusive programs for subscribers. For example, the; New York Times offers offline access to content for paying subscribers, among other benefits.

Consider setting up exclusive live chat news experiences for your paying subscribers. For example, you might offer pre-game interviews with VIP athletes right before a major game. To make the live chat experience more enticing, consider limiting attendance to a small group of 50-100 so each participant can be heard.

Start Expanding Your Online Media Reach Today

Getting started with Arena Live Chat is easy. You can install it on your website in less than 10 minutes. You can get started for free and start building your reach with a free trial. That’s enough time to hold a few events and grow your audience.

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Social Stream for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics

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Social Stream is a feature that can further enhance your Tokyo Olympics news coverage.

Bringing together the biggest names in more than 40 sports, the Olympic Games will undoubtedly be the biggest event of the year.

And for the first time in the history of the Olympics, the event will take place without the physical presence of an audience.

Indeed, millions of people across the planet will turn their attention exclusively to the screens of TVs, computers and cell phones to follow the disputes for medals and record-breaking performances.

The games are scheduled to officially kick-off on July 23rd.

But the fight for the best coverage, from the Opening Ceremony to the Closing Ceremony, has already started.

Check out below how you can improve your audience’s experience with Arena’s solutions.

Live Blog? Live Chat? Yes, for sure!

If your goal during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics includes audience engagement and revenue generation, Arena Live Blog and Live Chat can be your greatest allies.

Live Blog is the most suitable platform for real-time coverage.

Allowing instant text, image, audio and video content posting, the tool is very easy to install and operate.

Furthermore, Live Blog delivers a unique experience for the audience. Which, in turn, responds with more time spent on the website.

To find out how Live Blog Arena can boost your Olympic Games broadcast, check out the article we’ve prepared here.

Live Chat instantly connects your audience – with your brand and among each other – by exchanging text messages.

It offers features that encourage immediate user participation, such as polls and Q&A.

This gets them deeply involved in the broadcast.

And it can be summed up in just two words that are equivalent to gold in the digital universe: audience engagement.

Speaking of gold, both Live Chat and Live Blog make it possible to monetize your content.

Whether through display advertising insertion, or even direct conversion opportunities, a live stream can easily become a source of new revenue.

See how this happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8RDp6yxcqg

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Now, to elevate the relevance of the Tokyo 2021 Olympics digital broadcast in the vast ocean of content, there is a secret: Social Stream.

What is Social Stream?

Social Stream is an Arena Live Blog feature that allows you to integrate third-party hashtags and social profiles into a live stream event page.

For example: during a football match, it is possible to automatically include posts from the clubs’ official social channels.

This way, real-time coverage gains much more life, being enriched by contents from influencers and institutions.

And it avoids dispersion of the audience you’ve won to other platforms or social networks.

Today, it is possible to include social content from the following networks:

  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Reddit
  • web
  • Other (RSS)

Learn, step-by-step, how to set up your Social Stream. Also, checkout how Fox Sports Australia already leverages Social Stream in its live sports coverage.

Social Stream at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics

Arena has prepared a gift for you. And it will boost your Social Stream for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

It’s nothing more, nothing less than a spreadsheet filled with all the main profiles related to Olympic Games sports.

With them, your stream will be even more complete and powerful.

How to Create The Best Live Sports Streaming Events

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Creating a live sports streaming event is vitally important today for two reasons. It helps you to keep fans engaged in your event rather than drifting away to other activities. It is also vital because it is becoming the de facto industry standard, so you need to offer it to remain competitive.

How to Create The Best Live Sports Streaming Events

1. Understand your sports audience

Deeply understanding your audience is the foundation of creating an effective live sports streaming event. Use the following questions to gather information.

  • What are the most popular pre-event rituals your fans go through?
  • What do fans like to eat and drink during the event?
  • This tip is vital if you run a live sports streaming event for a sport you do not know personally.
  • Which athletes have the largest following and why?
  • By identifying the best-known players in advance, you can focus your effort on learning about them, highlighting their careers and past interviews.
  • What frustrates sports fans during live events?
  • Are there less exciting parts of the game (e.g., disputes over rules) that you could make more interesting?
  • What are your favorite sports memories, and what made them memorable?
  • Reflect on what made the event memorable. It might have been sharing a major team victory with friends or family, getting an autograph, or the excitement of attending your first game.

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Discuss these questions with your coworkers to gain their perspectives. Based on this information, you can start to develop specific engagement ideas in the next step. By the way, don’t be afraid to look at other sports for commentary ideas (e.g., if you usually focus on football, watch a live basketball game and see how other sports journalists comment on it).

2. Brainstorm live sports engagement ideas

With a better understanding of your audience, you can develop some ideas to enhance your live sports streaming. Stay organized by using the following categories.

Known Pre-Game Facts and Stats

Before the event, prepare a few ideas for comment and other ways you can engage fans. In particular, keep an eye out for fan favorites

  • Sports Statistics. You don’t have to know every sports statistic. However, it is helpful to know a few critical facts about key players. For a baseball game, you might track the batting average for the top batters.
  • Notable Absences. Make a note of any players absent from the game due to illness, injury, penalty, or other reasons. The loss of a star player could impact play.

Fan Monitoring

  • Make a list of at least ten active sports fans’ social media accounts. Ideally, you want to find fans who tend to post different content like data fans, followers of certain players, and humorous players.
  • Ask an assistant to help you with monitoring fan commentary during the broadcast.

Expert Commentary

  • Nearly every major sport has analysts and other experts. Make a list of at least five of these experts before the event. You can highlight comments from them as the event unfolds.
  • As with the fan monitoring idea, ask an assistant to help you with this step.

3. Set up and test live sports streaming technology

In this critical step, you will need to choose and select your technology for live streaming. For this discussion, let’s assume that the video broadcast itself is in place. Multiple channels and streaming services might be showing the same game. Adding engagement technology is one way to make your event memorable.

Two specific technologies are beneficial in creating an engaging live sports event.

  • Live Chat. Invite viewers to participate in your coverage by using Live Chat. You can install Live Chat on your website in less than a minute by copying one line of code. Are you worried about Internet trolls disrupting your event? You can ban users discretely without drawing attention away from the game.
  • Live Blog. Arena’s Live Blog makes it easy to encourage live discussion as the event unfolds. You can also post photos and videos. You can also invite your editors and coworkers to join you with Live Blog so that you can cover the eventfully.

Tip: Make sure you choose a technology that has built-in moderation capabilities to keep profanity under control.

4. Reach out to key sports fans in advance

When you first start a live chat, it is vital to have at least a few participants join in the conversation. If your website has high traffic, letting people know about the live chat opportunity might be enough. However, you don’t have to leave the event to chance.

Instead, take a proactive approach and invite a few critical fans to join the discussion. For example, you might want to reach out to smaller influencers (i.e., 1,000 to 10,000 followers on social media) and invite them to your live chat in advance of the event. To make the invitation more attractive, offer to highlight their most insightful comments during the live event.

5. Practice your live sports streaming with a small group

Learning to use new technology effectively takes some practice. That’s why we suggest planning a practice run. In this way, you can make mistakes and master your learning curve in front of a small audience of colleagues rather than tens of thousands of fans.

To make the most of your practice run, aim to simulate the live sporting event. For example, consider playing a recording of a recent game to simulate a live event. Ask some of your colleagues to act in different roles, such as sports fans, sports commentators, and assistants.

6. Run the live sports streaming event

You’ve done your homework, prepared your technology, and practiced your technique. Now you are ready to get down to work. Use the following tips to keep your live sports event running smoothly.

  • Start Early. Launch your video stream and live blog at least five minutes before the game starts. This added time will give you a chance to engage with the audience before the action starts.
  • Offer Your Commentary. As the sporting event unfolds, provide commentary on the players, techniques, and background information.
  • Use Commercial Breaks. Many professional-level sports events have commercial breaks scheduled into the game. Give yourself the chance to take a short break from screens so that you can come back focused.
  • Leverage Your Research. In a previous step, you researched the teams and players. Whenever the sport slows down, offer some of your findings. For example, you might share some notes from a famous player’s pre-game ritual (e.g. Cesc Fabregas, a Chelsea midfielder kisses a ring given to him by his wife four times before playing).
  • Highlight Your Guests. As a sports journalist, it isn’t easy to be an expert in everything! Fortunately, Arena Live Blog makes it easy to invite in your colleagues.
  • Feature social media comments. Take a few minutes to share social media posts from fans in your broadcast.

Now you are ready for the final step in creating the best live sports streaming events.

7. Debrief after the event

Developing mastery in running the best live sports streaming events takes practice. There is one way you can get better faster. Within 24 hours of the live event, schedule some time to debrief about the event. Ask yourself and others who worked with you three simple questions

What went well?

You might have found that content curation from social media was a big success in keeping fans engaged.

What didn’t go well?

Few live events go exactly as planned. Identify what went wrong (e.g., technical problems) and make a plan to address them next time.

What should we keep doing next time? What should we stop doing next time?

This final pair of questions is an excellent place to end your reflection because it keeps you focused on the future. To keep life simple, limit yourself to one or two lessons learned from each event. By repeating this step with each live event, you will keep getting better and better.

Use Arena To Improve Your Live Sports Streaming Event

Make it easy to involve your audience in your coverage by installing Arena. You can install Arena on your website in less than a minute. Not sure if it is right for you? Do it like Fox Sports and sign up today for a 14 free trial. See for yourself how Arena can make your live sports coverage even more engaging.

How to engage Sports Fans in the Digital World

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The boom in online sports media is a two-edged sword for sports broadcasters. On the one side, it is a threat because you have to compete with bloggers, data analysts, and super fans offering their views like Deadspin, Barstool Sports, ESPN, and Bad Jocks. On the flip side, broadcasters have powerful new tools to engage sports fans today.

Enriching sports broadcasting with a Live Blog

A Live Blog is a way to engage fans by providing rapid posts and updates as a game unfolds.

Adding live blogging to your sports coverage matters for a few key reasons. Speed is the first one. If it takes you too long to post expert commentary on scores and players, fans will likely drift away to other channels that give them up to the minute coverage. The ability to engage quickly and easily with fans is the second. Check out how Fox Sports Australia masters Live Blog for sports coverage.

Using a Live Blog matters in sports coverage because it is a fast way to provide coverage. It gives fans a reason to pay attention to you rather than looking at other experts.

Four tips for engaging your fans with a Live Blog

A Live Blog, on its own, will not keep your fans excited to stay interested. It would be best if you had a strategy to keep engaged. Draw from these ideas when you need inspiration to keep your sports audience engaged and following.

1. Provide play by play commentary on the game

Start by closely following the game as it unfolds. Think of your favorite radio and TV sports journalists as role model. Make sure you cover the key developments in the game in your Live Blog.

2. Share short interviews

Commercial breaks, injuries, and other developments sometimes slow down the action in sports. In these cases, share short interviews in your Live Blog. Before the game, interview a few players about their habits and hopes for the game. Share these short Q&A interviews during the game.

3. Explain sports rules

Almost every sport has complex rules designed to guarantee fairness. Sometimes, a dispute over rules can decide the outcome of a game like how many penalty shots a team gets. In your Live Blog, get ready to provide commentary on critical disputes over rules so that even casual fans can understand what’s happening.

4. Pull from the history of sports

Most sports have rich histories that go back decades or longer. Pull out your favorite reference websites and books to share sports history in your Live Blog. For example, if a player sets a new record in the game (e.g., Italy set a new record for final tournament goals in 2021), you can offer a quick blog post on the last person who set the record.

5. Share insights from business of sports

Some sports fans find the business side of sports fascinating. In advance of the game, make notes on important business deals like players signing significant contracts. Forbes reports that the four athletes like soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott earned over $100 million in 2020. Writing a Live Blog on the sports business is a way to deepen your understanding of sports and engage fans.

There is one caveat to keep in mind. When you run a live sports blog, there is a temptation to report every rumor that comes up. If you see a rumor of a potential trade or sponsorship, do your homework to verify the rumor before reporting it.

Talk with your sports audience directly with Live Chat

A Live Blog is a great way to provide up-to-minute live coverage. There’s just one drawback to it – it is more difficult for the audience to join the conversation. There’s a solution to that problem. Add Live Chat to your website so that sports fans can share their comments with you and other fans.

Sports conversations are happening every day around the world – online and offline. By adding Live Chat to your website, you can bring those conversations to your platform. When fans have the opportunity to be heard by their favorite sports broadcasters, they are more likely to stay engaged and loyal to your coverage.

Four tips for connecting with sports fans through Live Chat

When you are first getting started with a sports online chat room, you might not be share how to keep the conversation going. Use the following tips to lead the conversation.

1. Prepare a list of questions to encourage engagement

A well-crafted question is almost impossible to resist! That’s why we recommend asking questions to the audience. For example, you can ask fans if they agree with the coach’s strategy to change players. Alternatively, you might ask fans to share their predictions for a tournament. Preparing at least three to five questions in advance for your Live Chat session is well worth the effort.

2. Ask an assistant to highlight interesting contributions

With Arena Live Chat, you can invite thousands of people to your online chat room. When you have many sports fans sharing their passionate views, keeping up with the commentary may be difficult. First, don’t worry about responding to every comment. Second, ask an assistant to monitor the Live Chat room and pull out interesting questions and comments. By specifically responding to thoughtful comments to feature in your coverage, you will encourage fans to make positive comments.

3. Thank fans for contributing to the Live Chat

As the Live Chat session comes to an end, take the time to thank fans for contributing. When possible, make your thanks specific. Consider calling out a few specific chat room comments that made your life or made you think. This kind of public recognition may help bring back passionate sports fans on your next Live Chat session.

4. Keep the trolls out

Like it or not, some people are troublemakers in the online world. Fortunately, sports broadcasters don’t have to worry about security and riots. But disrespectful comments and profanity are still problems that need to be managed. Arena Live Chat includes features to control your trolls quickly and painlessly. Arena Live Chat also includes a feature to automatically detect and block profanity – a key feature when fans get upset!

Two Steps To Getting Started With Arena

Your choice at this point is simple. Step one: decide whether you want to start with Live Chat or Live Blog. Step two: sign up for a free Arena trial to see how live chatting and live blogging work for your fans.

Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

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Today customer’s expectations from a brand have risen from mere marketing of freebies and discounts to a brand’s ability to relate with the “human element”. To earn loyalty, customers want the brands to interact with them and prove their worth in this cutting-edge consumer market.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement in simple words is the relationship between a customer and a business. To ensure customer engagement, companies work towards creating a relationship with their customers to improve brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Customer engagement is crucial to a brand’s interaction with its customers. A highly engaged customer will be more aware of the brand’s vision and mission, and will likely become part of the loyal customer base.

What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?

Customer engagement strategy is defined as the tools businesses use to build strong and engaging relationships with customers. It also involves anticipating customer’s needs, solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals.

An effective customer engagement strategy builds long lasting impressions in the minds of consumers. It also increases awareness of the brand and improves customer engagement. 

The key to a strong customer engagement strategy is to introduce technologies that favor user interaction, user retention on the page, sales, and user participation with the content.

Some of the famous brands like Coca Cola, Starbucks, Rogers Media, Super Bowl, and Apple are renowned around the world for their inspiring and effective customer engagement strategies. Let us take a look at a few of them.

1. Coca Cola

When it comes to marketing, Coca Cola is usually ahead of the game. In 2012, Coca Cola launched a marketing campaign called “ShareACoke” where the company’s logo was replaced by some of the most common names of people in the US. Adding a name to the bottle spoke to the consumers on a personal level and thus became a powerful marketing strategy. 

Within the first year, people shared more than 500,000 photos via the #ShareaCoke hashtag. The campaign became consumer driven where highly active users on social media channels began sharing their pictures with friends and family. 

Thus consumers were acting as creative directors for the brand itself which led to a high engagement on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

2. Starbucks

Starbucks sets a great example of establishing strong customer engagement strategies every year. “My Starbucks Rewards” program was launched in 2009 which allowed Mobile Order & Pay feature where customers would order ahead of time and pick up their orders in the store. This allowed them to cut lines and order through convenience of their phone.

In addition, the rewards program also allowed consumers to check their balance, make use of their star points and earn free coffee refills or food items.

Starbucks doesn’t just limit its marketing projects to social media but also to a wider digital audience. In one of the campaigns called Starbucks’ Love Project, the company collaborated with several artists such as Dave Matthews, John Legend and U2 to create “All You Need Is Love CD.” 

In participating Starbucks locations, customers would get a free CD with a purchase of $15 or more. They were then invited to upload their video to become part of a massive sing-along. Thousands came on board!

3. Superbowl

We are all familiar with Superbowl — the iconic game that generates one of the biggest days for advertising in the US! Companies can learn amazing lessons from the way Superbowl advertisers harness the power of customer engagement in their campaigns. Many organizations even utilize the pre-gaming screen time to start advertising their products and services ahead of the game. 

For example Uber’s pre-gaming marketing featured #UberPuppyBowl; hashtag and promoted the chance for select Uber offices to enjoy a 15 minute cuddle huddle with puppies in select Uber’s offices.

Today with the rise of social media, organizations are leveraging the power of both the mainstream as well as social media platforms to advertise their products. During last year’s Superbowl, Avocados From Mexico’s advertisement featuring Molly Ringwald didn’t receive as much traction as they were expecting.

However, the brand took to Twitter’s live-tweeting responses for the rest of their ads and the halftime show, garnering more attention than their original ad!

Creating a Compelling Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

User interaction, retention and participation are key elements in creating a compelling customer engagement strategy. This helps improve sales and builds long lasting impressions. 

One of the tools that can help you create a compelling engagement strategy is the live chat feature. Companies are now utilizing live chats during webinars, online conferences, live events and for free ecommerces. 

A live chat feature improves customer experience, builds stronger branding, and helps you gain a competitive edge over your competition. 

Whether you work with small or large businesses, in 2021, you absolutely need a Live Chat tool as part of your marketing strategy. Although live chat feature has been around for a while, companies are now proactively using it on their websites and social media platforms.

Here are some of the strategies you can use to improve your customer engagement through live chat features.

Create Positive Brand Perception

Brands all around the world strive to create a positive perception for their products and services. Live chat can be a useful tool to help you achieve that perception through real-time user engagement. During your brand’s live event broadcasts such as webinars, fashion shows, conferences, concerts, or stand up comedies, you can use the live chat feature for your viewers to engage not just with the content but also with one another in real-time.

Live chat provides you more opportunities to make meaningful connections, which will further promote your brand perception and awareness. There is a power in the ripple effect that a good word of mouth can cause!

Improve KPIs

When working with live chat tools, companies need to understand how to improve their KPIs to ensure positive results. Technologies such as live chat tools can be forefront in creating real-time engagement for your brand. 

When customers interact with an event on your website, they might pose questions about a product launch or may generally be interested in knowing more about your brand. Ensuring the interaction doesn’t stay one-sided, you can take that time to answer the questions for the viewers.  

In addition, you can improve your KPIs in other productive ways too. For example if many customers are asking the same questions over and over again, it is a better idea to include an FAQ page on your website.  

Create an Online Community

Live Chat feature is not only about consumer and business interaction, it is also about consumer to consumer interaction. During live webinars and online events, you can set up a live chat where the viewers can interact with each other. A great example of live chat interaction can be seen on YouTube live videos where viewers communicate with one another by every second.

Other companies like Daily Telegraph, City Gates, CA, Bridgend College, Fox Sports have been using the live chat feature creatively on their social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Provide a Personalized User Experience

When interacting with a brand, customers look for a personalized experience that can address their demands. A personalized real-time experience increases customer satisfaction and improves the perceived value of your brand.

Rather than treating your customer as a transaction or another name on your email list, approach them as human beings who have goals, interests, and preferences. Through a carefully tailored experience, you can help them achieve those goals.

Increase Your Revenue

According to an eMarketer survey on the attitude towards US online buyers who used live chat showed that 63% users were more likely to visit a site again. And 62% of the respondents who engaged through a live chat feature said that they were more likely to purchase from the site again.

Having a live chat feature on your website can have a significant impact on your sales. Using a chat tool during a purchase can influence your customer’s decision to continue with the purchase.

Conclusion

Companies all around the world use multiple tools to improve their online visibility, user experience and sales. Many argue that a positive customer experience is pivotal to success of a business and we couldn’t agree more.

According to a study by AMA Access on how B2B marketers are leveraging live chat to increase their sales, the research found that throughout the customer journey, companies can use live chat to improve: 

  • Marketing awareness by 29%
  • Conversion to create sales suspects by 39%
  • Post-sales customer support and engagement by 39%

Try our freemium Live Chat tool Arena to stay on the top of your marketing game, implement effective customer engagement strategies and produce happy customers!

All You Need to Know About Content Moderation

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If you are about to, or now managing an online business platform, you might have known already or have been researching about the world of content moderation. Also, you must have heard this popular opinion – the online platform kind of business is not that easy. 

Well, yes sure! It is not, but if you have the right strategy to operate it, alongside ways to overcome possible problems related to it, as well as the knowledge of some other factors that should be avoided and considered in order to get that fast and efficient result, then you are good to go. But if you don’t have any, don’t worry! We got you covered! 

What is content moderation?

There are millions of content online, but not all of them are effective nor meet readers’ expectations. This is where content moderation comes into place. In simple words, content moderation is the process of screening, approving, or removing user-generated content based on some guidelines in order to establish clients’ trust, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

There are lots of reasons why content moderation is important. First, it screens content that is submitted by a certain user to know if the posting guidelines are being violated. Second, it is an effective way for a business to keep a positive reputation which guarantees a decent relationship with clients, thus advances higher accommodation and satisfaction among users and clients.

What is human moderation?

Human moderation or manual moderation is another type of moderating content, however, the one behind it of course – human. Human moderators manually monitor and review clients’ or users’ posts on a particular online platform. 

Moreover, human moderators also ensure the protection of all users or clients from scammers, anomalies, or any type of harassment that occurs in social media. They are also responsible for maintaining the quality and standards of a particular social media platform.

What is automated moderation?

Automated moderation is an automatic process of moderation that automatically determines any-user generated content. In this kind of moderation, contents that are being rejected or published are done based on the pre-defined guidelines by a highly intelligent computer bot that closely monitors the system 24/7.

Automated moderation resolves any physical or psychological stress from human moderators as it can minimize the response time, improve the quality of service, save time, and increase cost quality outcomes.

How important is content moderation in enhancing customer experience?

Utilizing social media platforms is an effective way to connect with customers regarding a particular business you have to offer. With social media, you can create customer service and build strong customer relationships without having to meet them in person. 

In line with this, effective and efficient content moderation can help you know your customers better, engage with them in real-time, establish customer loyalty with your brand, and achieve user retention as it offers good credibility of the event.

Nowadays, every brand is always active on almost every social media platform. In line with this, content moderation is of great help in monitoring social media accounts, comments, images, and videos, as well as categorizing and indexing business offerings.

Content moderation can also help you with online reputation management. Your online reputation is very important for the success of your business. As you might have known, whatever people post or publish online regarding your business, true or not, all have a significant influence on your business reputation. 

And, content moderation can help you fight against harmful content, address clients’ criticisms, and most importantly, feature important and helpful feedback from customers.

Content Moderation in Building Relationships with Customers

As have mentioned above, content moderation can help you build strong connections with your clients or customers. You can use content moderation to make your customers feel satisfied with your services offered by personalizing your responses, as well as keeping them in the loop with any timely news like product updates. With this, the strong relationships you have with them can help you achieve repeat and referral business.

What are the things you should keep in mind when moderating content?

There is a wide range of factors to consider with content moderation. This is very important in order for you to achieve the content that best suits your business. These factors also depend on what platform or site you are using. However, regardless of what site, platform, or business you are having, these are the top 7 things you should keep in mind, or better – do!

  1. Select the best content for your business

There is no one else in the world who knows your business better than you. You know best what your products and services are as well as your users or customers. So, you can use these to help you create the most outstanding content out there that best meets their expectations.

  1. Choose the best content moderation to utilize for your content.

With the best content you have, choose the best content moderation method to utilize. Aim to stand out amongst others. You can do this by using the best content moderation method that is not only suitable for your content and business but also fit your platform’s specific needs.

  1. Always make your content personalized to your customers’ needs.

When your customers feel special, they usually go back to you over and over again. With this, it will drive your repeat and referral business, which often results in more positive business outcomes. That is why, when creating content, make it as personalized as possible, moderate it according to the needs of your customers as this often results in increasing engagement which will lead to more loyalty and conversion rates.

  1. Moderate all your content consistently

Whether you are running your online business via Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms or sites, it is very important for you to make appealing and pleasant content that will surely attract new customers or retain your existing customers. This can be done by moderating your content in a consistent manner. This means that you have to be very meticulous in choosing the right format, images, videos, and other visual factors that will be incorporated into your content.

  1. Establish concise rules and regulations

Establishing concise rules and regulations is one of the most important things to do when moderating content. Therefore, these rules and regulations should be clear for all who are involved in moderating your content, be it from the data analyst to the human or automated moderators.

  1. Utilize all your resources

Every content moderation tool and equipment matters, right? This is why you need to utilize them in the best possible manner. Sometimes, you might see yourself overwhelmed with the available resources in the market, some are paid, some are free.

In this case, it’s very important for you to consider these resources carefully, prioritize the ones that offer innovation and growth as these often boost success to your online platform business.

  1. Quality over quality

Sometimes you have a lot of ideas, and you want all of these to be utilized. This often happens to almost everybody, but always remember that quality is more important than quantity. Quality content builds your customers’ trust, resulting in acquiring more revenue and success for your online business platform.

Customer Interaction

Your interactions with your customers are vital to your business success. Customer experience can make or break your business. That is why you as the business owner have to make these interactions as smooth and flawless and possible. 

There are various ways for you to engage with your customers, you can do this through Live Chats, Live Blogs, posts, tweets, comments, etc. Regardless, when interacting with them, you should be timely when responding to their inquiries, make it personalized, maintain positive emotions when commenting, reposting, and retweeting, and most importantly, always include available links for FAQs in your content.

Conclusion

Nowadays, the online platform business is very competitive. Therefore, you should moderate your content for you to stand out amongst the others. Always think ahead, know the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and engage with your customers frequently in order for you to be able to know them well, alongside their weak points and needs. Try also to utilize the tips mentioned above. 

Additionally, you can also utilize Arena when engaging with your customers through Live Chat, Live Blog, and other Customer Engagement ideas. Arena is easy to integrate, perfect for conversations, community chat, as well as ratings and reviews.

Are you ready to drive more revenue to your business? 

Now, try the Arena for free!

Customer Engagement Tips to Improve Sales

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Sometimes, all you need to grow your business is more sales conversions. If you are already getting enough traffic, converting them to sales may be enough to give your business the boost it needs to move ahead of the competitor. That is exactly what improved customer engagement can do for you. 

What Is Customer Engagement? 

Customer engagement can best be described as an ongoing interaction between a company and its customers. Practically, it refers to your company’s ability to keep up a conversation with your customer in the most efficient manner throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Customer engagement entails frequent and effective communication with the customers. It is achieved when the communication channels offered by the company is accepted by the customers. Its effectiveness will be measured by the results the continued conversation yields. 

Every business needs a customer engagement strategy to survive. In a competitive market, the ability of a business to connect with customers and keep the conversation going is critical to survival. With the right strategies and tools, customer engagement brings satisfaction to businesses and customers. 

Why Is Customer Engagement So Important? 

Customer engagement is critical to business growth. In the very beginning, it helps to transform traffics into leads. The right customer engagement tools, like Arena Live Chat, will help to convert most of the leads into sales.

Customer engagement also plays a critical role in customer experience, which is an indispensable ingredient in customer retention. If a business is able to convert more leads into sales and make the right first impression, it will certainly lead to repeat sales. With several repeat business, the company can build customer loyalty. 

In summary, customer engagement is considered very important for the following reasons: 

  • It will help drive your sales conversion and help you sell more
  • It will help you reduce churn
  • It will help increase customer satisfaction and retention
  • It can help boost customer loyalty
  • It will help you win back old customers.

How Can Customer Engagement Specifically Help Drive Sales Conversion? 

To convince website visitors to buy a product, pay for a service, o visit a physical office, you need to engage them and convince them and build trust. That is the essence of a customer engagement strategy. Here are specific ways customer engagement can specifically lead to an increase in sales for your business:

  • It Will Keep Customers Informed 

Most customers need more information about products and services before making a purchase. Being able to engage them and get them informed improves the chances of conversion. Well-informed customers are more likely to become return customers, also. 

  • It Creates Brand Awareness 

Brand awareness drives sales, and customer engagement enhances brand awareness. When you engage customers, you will make them recognize your brand. It doesn’t take much, afterward, to establish brand awareness, which is always instrumental in purchases and contract renewals. 

  • It Helps Identify What Customers Truly Want 

Sometimes sales pitches fail because marketers are not really aware of what customers want. True engagement allows you to assess the true needs of the customers and help them figure out the best solution. Through customer engagement, you will be able to create customer value, which drives sustainable sales conversion. 

  • It Opens Up the Possibility of Larger Orders 

It is a known fact that engaged customers tend to spend more – there are actually many marketing studies that have confirmed this. Through customer engagement, you will be able to establish trust. Of course, the more your customers love you, the more they will buy from you. 

  • It Transforms Customers to Brand Advocates 

Never underestimate the power of informed and happy clients. They will most likely become your brand advocates, helping to spread the message and fetch you many more customers. Thanks to social media, it is a lot easier for your engaged and happy customers to refer your business to more people. Word of mouth and other channels still works. 

What Role Can Live Chat Play In Customer Engagement? 

Live Chat is an effective marketing tool that can play a significant role in customer engagement. Arena Live Chat, for instance, is an instant communication channel that you can add to your website to stimulate and generate real-time customer engagement. 

Live Chat is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to generate meaningful engagement. It is better than chatbots since it adds the much needed human factor to ongoing conversations with customers. 

Can Live Chat Really Help To Drive Sales Conversion? 

Yes, Live Chat can truly help to drive sales conversion. As we’ve established already, it is one of the most effective ways to generate meaningful customer engagement. Live Chat customer service will also boost sales conversion in the following ways: 

  • It delights customers 
  • It shortens the sales cycle 
  • It  facilitates upsells and cross-sells 
  • It brings some level of personalization to marketing 

What Can You Do To Optimize Live Chat For Engagement And Sales Conversion? 

Implementing Live Chat will undoubtedly help you to generate engagement and drives your sales conversion. However, to get the right result, you will have to make the right decision with your Live Chat service. The first important thing is to choose the right Live Chat tool. Over the years, Arena Live Chat has helped several businesses benefit immensely from customer engagement. 

In addition to choosing the right Live Chat tool, you need to customize your Live Chat to have the desired impact and bring the right benefits. There is a need to follow a protocol and create a template that is purpose-oriented. This is the only way to ensure that each Live Chat session with a customer is treated with the utmost regard. 

Success Stories With Arena Live Chat 

As hinted above, the Arena Live Chat has helped several businesses to record meaningful success in their marketing. One outstanding case is the success story of Rogers Communication. The giant Communication and Media Company used Arena to increase customer engagement by more than 64%. Live Chat Roger also helped the company to achieve 28% customer retention and many more benefits. 

Endnote 

Customer engagement is a critical aspect of marketing. Among many things, it can help to drive sales conversion. As we’ve discussed here, Live Chat can play a significant role in boosting customer engagement and driving sales. You just need to choose the right tools and implement them the right way to derive the full benefits. 

Are you ready to implement the best Live Chat service for your business?

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.

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