Category Archives: Live Blog

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!

How Amazon boosted user engagement at Prime Day

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Amazon Prime Day is arguably the most profitable day of the year for eCommerce. In 2020, analysts believe sales rocket by 49 percent, hitting $10.6 billion and over 200 million products sold.

As Amazon keeps expanding its global reach – only this year, Prime Day happened simultaneously in 19 countries – some markets presented significant opportunities for affiliates that generate revenue from promoting Amazon’s products.

According to Amazon, Brazil is the country with the fastest growth in Prime subscriptions. Currently, the benefits plan already has active users in 95% of the country’s municipalities.

Tecmundo and Amazon Prime Day

Tecmundo, one of Brazil’s most popular websites for technology news, with over 20 million unique visitors, leveraged the Amazon Prime Day to boost its revenue and bring massive traffic to their website.

As I wrote before, Globo – the world’s second-largest TV Network – used the Arena Live Blog and Live Chat to cover the NBA finals and increase user engagement and revenue. 

Tecmundo went one step ahead and combined Arena’s products, Amazon Prime Day, and its own digital domains to create a unique environment – comparable to a real store on a Black Friday, with many customers interactions, conversations, and of course, sales.

To explore Amazon Prime Day as much as possible, Tecmundo created a hot site to cover all of Amazon’s best deals in real-time with continuous updates and ongoing discussions about the offers, products, and genuine customer reviews. The hot site basically consisted of Arena’s Live Blog and Live Chat.

Why Live Blog?

A live blog is, put simply, a curated news feed that can be integrated into websites, providing rolling coverage of any event in real-time. It combines content that is usually fragmented across the web, complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, polls, live group chats, and other digital assets that can be embedded in the feed.

Live blogs are widely used for breaking news coverage as they consolidate reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. 

It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple formats in an easy-to-digest layout. 

What is a Live Chat?

A Live Chat is a communication platform that enables users to engage in relevant conversations with each other. Live Chats are commonly used to cover live events to provide an instant communication channel to users of a specific website, for instance. 

A Live Chat is the ideal option for companies that want to provide real-time interactions for customers who are browsing their website, learning about their products, and analyzing the brand’s reliability, for example.

Getting creative with Live Chat and Live Blog

On its hot site created exclusively for Amazon Prime Day, Tecmundo utilized a remodeled Arena Live Blog and Live Chat.

The Live Blog that usually displays conventional news updates in real-time, was configured only to show product offerings and hot deals from Prime Day. The Live Blog was automatically curating these deals from Amazon’s domains. 

The Arena Live Chat was also integrated into the same page. Potential buyers could talk between themselves, question the products’ quality, share personal experiences, reviews, and ask Tecmundo’s dedicated support team questions about the merchandise.

How Arena CDP can refine your sales strategy 

Today, marketing leaders need robust tools to optimize and personalize every interaction while engaging users to build significant and lasting relationships.

Arena offers the full solution to engage, understand, and turn your users into paying customers.

The Arena Data Platform enables publishers like Tecmundo to regain control of their user’s data. 

Our solution offers a unified 360-degree view of users, gathering data from different points of contact (multiple platforms) and enabling companies to find out who their potential customers are, how they behave, when they are ready to buy, and why.

The Arena Customer Data Platform consolidates all the customer data on a comprehensive dashboard to build an authentic unified profile.

Publishers can then analyze customer behavior in real-time to build unique customer experiences to increase engagement and sales on their platforms. 

You can also create experiences like Rogers Media, Fox Sports, Globo and many more. Start a free trial now and see for yourself.

Next level of Real-time coverage at the NBA

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The NBA finals are one of the most anticipated sports events in the world. This year, apart from the coronavirus pandemic and record-low TV ratings, over 7 million viewers tuned in, just in the US, to watch the games. 

With millions of die-hard fans and worldwide visibility, it’s natural that some businesses turn the event into a giant marketing funnel.

In fact, the NBA itself has proven to be one of the most profitable sports businesses ever, with estimated annual revenue topping 8 billion dollars.

NBA real-time coverage

In times of quarantine, the interest in real-time content is even higher amongst internet users. 

Customers are always on. Given the newness of technology and innovation, they have all the tools to remain connected nonstop and wish to consume reliable information that leads them to make better decisions. The faster, the better. 

People are getting used to new ways of consuming digital content.

With empty stadiums and arenas, live content has become the closest fans can get to live-action. High-quality content is more important now than it has ever been.

Customer Experience tools are on the rise, and Live Blog and Live Chat are quickly becoming the best ally for businesses that rely on content creation and distribution.

Why Live Blog?

A live blog is, put simply, a curated news feed that can be integrated into websites, providing rolling coverage of any event in real-time. It combines content that is usually fragmented across the web, complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, polls, live group chats, and other digital assets that can be embedded in the feed.

Live blogs are widely used for breaking news coverage as they consolidate reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. 

It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple formats in an easy-to-digest layout. 

How to leverage a live chat to cover real-time events?

A Live Chat is a communication platform that enables users to engage in relevant conversations with each other. Live Chats are commonly used on the coverage of live events to provide an instant communication channel to users of a specific website, for instance. 

A Live Chat is the ideal option for companies that want to provide real-time interactions for customers who are browsing their website, learning about their products, and analyzing the brand’s reliability, for example.

Globo TV and the NBA Finals

Looking for fresh and real-time alternatives to provide valuable content to its customers, Rede Globo, the second-largest commercial TV network in the world, made a pioneering move by adopting two of Arena’s CX solutions to broadcast the NBA Live finals.

Using the Arena Live Blog to cover the matches – play-by-play – and the Arena Live Chat to enable passionate discussions amongst fans, Globo had audience peaks of tens of thousands of users following its Live Blog coverage concurrently. Their Live Chat, which was only open for Globo’s paying subscribers, had over four thousand users at the same time.

Covering such an important event, during a pandemic, can be even more challenging for journalists. Besides reporting on the game, they need to keep an eye on everything that’s happening off the court.

The best way to put all the news together and deliver it to its users is through the Arena Live Blog. Globo used our Live Blog as a sort of “second-screen content” to its users while the finals were going on and aggregated news about the teams, players, and fans.

Dynamic and extremely interactive, the Arena Live Blog allowed the TV network to bring different post formats and sources together to deliver real-time updates for their instant audience. 

Globo live blogged the NBA finals through several content formats, such as videos, audios, texts, and social media posts to shape a diverse and more interactive feed. They also used live polls with game-related questions, to increase user’s interaction.  

We can say Globo mastered the art of live blogging. Already widely popular among their soccer fans, the TV network is now bringing the same recipe – anticipation, hype, real-time – to the national basketball league.

During its live transmission, Globo also embedded paid ads into their Live Blog to increase revenue. The TV network learned that it’s easier to sell when your audience’s interest is peaking. 

And when you have tens of thousands of users simultaneously watching your Live Blog, engaging in polls and Live Chats discussions, it’s fair to assume that user engagement is no longer a problem.

By curating and providing real-time updates from people literally on the inside of the game, Globo had the ability to immerse their viewers in the game like they are actually there. 

With the Live Blog coverage of the NBA finals, Globo also managed to engage paid users in exciting discussions about the game, plays, and players.

In quarantine times, having real-time and play-by-play updates, inside coverage, discussions – sometimes heated – with other fans following the same game, it’s not too much to say this is the closest sports fan will get to a real sports arena.

Providing multimedia content and an innovative narrative experience to its audience is already paying off to Globo. The TV network made the Arena CX solutions a central piece of their communication strategy, and it’s seeing a relevant growth in user engagement, time spent on their web domains, and ROI.

With the Arena Live Blog and Live Chat, the possibilities are endless.

You can also create experiences like Globo did in the NBA broadcast. Take a free trial now and see for yourself.

GDPR: How using a CDP solves cookies problems

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created to give internet users more control over their personal information. Is your company working according to the law?

While you’re probably aware of the existence of this regulation, you may still not know all you need to about it. For example, did you know this law has existed since 1995? Yeah, and only in 2012 has it started being reviewed.

That happened because of the huge amount of data being generated nowadays. As a matter of fact, the foresight for the year 2020 was that 35 trillion gigabytes were going to be created. It makes sense that a project for data protection would start.

Approved in 2016, the GDPR is a project made in the European Union. However, it affects each and every country that has a connection with EU countries. That means anyone who buys or sells products or services with a country that is a part of the region needs to follow the data protection rules.

In order to make that job easier, many brands are appealing to the Customer Data Platform. This is a solution that works with Customer Data without breaking the law. To thoroughly understand how the CDP can help here, how the GDPR works, and more, keep reading this post.

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What is the GDPR?

With the growth of data usage came the need for some kind of regulation for brands to use information without becoming invasive to users online. Because of that, GDPR came into force.

As you can probably imagine, the main reason behind it is to protect the user and their privacy. Mainly because, with the amount of technologies nowadays, it’s so easy to gather data and use them to personalize ads and content. 

However, that only works if the user allows you to do it. If you send personalized offers for someone who has never even been to your website, it will feel like a privacy invasion.

With GDPR, the user or client has a guarantee of control over data collected. This means that the company needs to ask for permission to gather and store information about them. But, even more than that, the brand needs to make clear what kind of information is being collected, what it will be used for, how long it will be kept in storage, and who it will be shared with.

What about customers’ rights? To sum up what GDPR says about the subject, the client must have:

  • access to collected data
  • control to correct wrong data
  • possibility of data exclusion
  • access to review and deny automated processes using their data
  • visibility of data transfer to thirds

It does sound like a lot to keep track of, but it comes with a bigger reward: a trustful relationship between brand and customer.

What does that mean? Instead of looking like a privacy-invasor brand, it only communicated with the client according to what they alone decided to share with the company. Therefore, building their success through a highly tailored and excellent customer experience.

How do GDPR and CDP work together?

In order for the company to work according to GDPR rules, it needs strict control over the data they collect. They need to know where the data came from, where it is stored, how it is being used, who it is being shared with, and so on. Every single detail needs to be known.

So, this is where CDP comes into the picture:

The Customer Data Platform, CDP, is a system that does this thorough job with customer data. It collects, processes, and stores data that is relevant, useful, and clean.

Overall, the CDP is built to provide the company flexibility. In other words, even though it’s mainly used for marketing purposes, it can allow other software to have access to its information. 

Thus, the Customer Data platform does exactly what companies need, now that GDPR is out there. Since they need to know everything about the data, CDP is there for it.

What are some specific requirements of GDPR that the CDP is helping brands with? Here’s a few of them:

  • identify where data comes from
  • connect with other data sources
  • gather all customer data into a singular profile
  • correct data
  • document customer authorizations
  • manage and store data usage
  • privacy by design

Moreover, the Customer Data Platform is pivotal for first-party data collection. Something essential seeing that third-party data is becoming less popular by the day — which happens due to the lack of reliability in this type of information, that also breaks (most of the time) GDPR laws of data protection.

The use of first-party data is the goal from now on. With this, you can ask for permission of the user in the direct relationship of the brand website visitor.

In short, to work according to GDPR, companies have the option of not collecting data (kind of unfeasible in this day and age), collect less data than they used to, or use systems that work through those rules, like the CDP.

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What is there to know about the CDP?

As previously mentioned, the Customer Data Platform is the best alternative for brands that want to work with Customer Data while sticking to the GDPR.

It is a system developed to assist marketing teams, but it has grown into much more than that. That is, helping several sectors inside a company, like sales, customer support, and customer attendance.

For that reason, it has also become an essential tool to stand out from the competition while offering the best customer experience.

Through clear and reliable data collection, processing, and storage, a brand can custom content, offers, and ads according to both individual profiles and segmentation groups. Which, by the way, the CDP itself creates.

Additionally, all types of data are read by the software. Though it collects and gives preference for first-party data, it can also work with second and third-party data. What it does is select and separate what data is actually valuable for the company, putting it in storage, and what’s not. 

Here’s a detail to remember: it does this selection considering the regulation (GDPR).

Is there anything else you need to know about the CDP?

Of course there is. The CDP is a huge program that does a lot more than help you with GDPR. Inside its system, there is a client history. Thus, more than an individual profile per customer, it’s also possible to understand how each of them behave online — what kind of purchase they make, which products they’re interested in, etc.

What we really want to say here is that the Customer Data Platform meets your GDPR needs. Plus, it keeps you worry-free in relation to unreliable or illegal data usage.

So, even though we still would have a lot more to talk about with the CDP, let’s just highlight this: with this software, you only use information to personalize content provided by the client, him or herself!

And what does that lead to? A double benefit for the company: improve CX and brand credibility.

How to get a CDP?

You probably have no more questions left regarding the need of a CDP for accomplishing GDPR regulation. But you might still be wondering how to acquire a CDP solution.

The first step is simple: do your research.

Once you know what is in the market, you can easily pick a platform that will meet all your needs. 

You don’t need much more than that. Once you acquire the CDP, set it up and start using it. Simple as that!

Here at Arena, our platform is a guaranteed solution for working with Customer Data. With over a thousand clients, we know how to deliver what you’re looking for. Besides, we also have some other solutions to make your customer experience strategy go up the charts such as Live Chat, Live Blog, and Content Wall.

Now, back to our main topic, let’s see what’s next:

What are the CDP benefits for data usage in the GDPR era?

Along with some benefits already mentioned, like the complete work with Customer Data, there are other advantages that make the CDP complete software that any company should get.

For example, the possibility of all company employees to have access to the data — with due permission. Whether it’s a sales rep, customer support, or product developers.

Especially in the Customer-centric period we’re currently in, allowing every sector to have access to this customer data just makes the job easier and the strategy maintained with efficiency.

Now, there are three other reasons to have a CDP that are directly related to the GDPR project:

Low cost

In spite of not being the cheapest data control tool in the market, it does stand out as the most complete and provides the best price-performance ratio. One of the reasons that makes this possible is that the platform is already built and programmed without the need of an IT support team.

That is to say, you simply acquire the Customer Data Platform, make some basic configurations, and start benefiting from it. No need to hire a platform support team or anything like that.

Another thing: this tool is faster than others that work with data, such as the CRM. In addition, your goals will be reached easier and, likewise, faster with it.

Individual and unified profile

What happened before CDP came to the market was data duplication.

Let’s explain this better:

A system like CRM, for example, doesn’t have the capability of recognizing different actions made by the same client. So, if someone interacts with the brand through the website and then by email, the software thinks it’s two different people.

With the CDP, that problem doesn’t exist. It is built to identify and unify these actions into a singular customer profile. Thus, avoiding data duplication.

No matter how many interactions or where they take place, the platform will be able to understand it is the same person and gather the information in the same place.

Easy external access

Okay, so, we’re talking about how CDP is superior to other data collection systems. This doesn’t mean you need to get this platform and get rid of everything you currently use. Not at all. 

The Customer Data Platform has the ability to connect with other systems, so you can take advantage of all the data you already have by connecting your platforms and centralizing all data into one place.

Even more, if there is incorrect, duplicated, or data going against GDPR, the CDP can correct and/or delete this information.

This way, before you waste your current database, make sure if it’s worth it or not to practice this integration between platforms.

Moreover, other software that is not directly related to data collection could perform better with the help of a CDP database. Don’t hold back doing your research.

So far, you’ve learned some of the main tasks of a Customer Data Platform, but there is still a lot more to know about it. How about reading our ebook on the subject? The download is free and the knowledge is uncanny!

Ecommerce Customer Experience: how to optimize it

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A good eCommerce customer experience offers much more than just speed and ease: it fits customers’ preferences to increase their lifetime value and keep your churn rate low.

It’s no secret that people are shopping online more and more. With social distancing, the average customer profile has evolved and adapted to navigate and make eCommerce purchases.

Ecommerce has been a key channel in retail, marketing, and sales operations, to the point it globally represents three-quarters of the overall retail growth. According to Statista, eCommerce sales are supposed to reach almost $604 billion in 2021.

Whether eCommerce sales are made overseas or regionally, one thing is true: The customer is at its center, and offering an at-least-good customer experience is a basic requirement.

Still, that is not what we usually see these days. Regrettably, it is very common to find bad eCommerce customer experiences, such as buggy checkout processes.

Well, that’s no laughing matter. Losing a customer in the checkout process means you’re saying goodbye to the most concrete revenue you might be able to get.

Why is eCommerce customer experience so important?

Owning an inventory and simply selling it isn’t enough, especially in the competitive market we witness today. Products and services aren’t differentiators anymore—but good eCommerce customer experience is.

An eCommerce experience refers to the quality of the interactions customers have in digital stores.

To achieve acceptable levels of quality, the user interaction should match customers’ expectations and provide them with fantastic eCommerce customer experience—there is where its importance lies.

Customer experience decides if you’re selling or not—literally—when it comes to eCommerce. 

The following statistics, provided by CX Central, make it clear:

  • After going through a poor experience, 89% of customers say they have stopped buying from a brand
  • Customer experience is overtaking price and products as a key brand differentiator
  • Eighty-six percent (86%) of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience
  • In general, 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer an excellent mobile experience
  • Around 25% of online shoppers leave the website without paying if they find the website navigation too complicated

As you can see, offering a bad eCommerce customer experience is the way to chaos. Simultaneously, a good eCommerce customer experience is the way to customer engagement.

But how can you avoid being in the bad eCommerce statistics?

Keep in mind that every and each eCommerce operation should be built considering how the customer feels throughout the buying journey. 

If customers feel bad about your brand while on your eCommerce, they won’t hesitate to open a new tab and search for your competitor quickly. Competition is a few clicks away.

This means you have to offer a seamless, intuitive, eCommerce customer experience.

What makes a good eCommerce customer experience?

A good eCommerce customer experience should allow your customers to move through your online shop with speed and ease while matching their personal preferences.

This might differ from customer to customer – that’s why it is important to know them deeply.

In case you’re in doubt whether you’re offering a great eCommerce customer experience or not, there are a few KPIs that can help you get your answers.

We know a large portion of customers abandon the cart because that’s how they browse eCommerce. 

Still, according to Baymard, the main reasons for cart abandonment during checkouts are too high extra costs (50%), eCommerce demanding customers to create an account (28%), and too long checkout processes (21%). 

Another interesting statistic is that customer retention in eCommerce is 5X cheaper than acquisition. 

This suggests that keeping your customers and increasing their Lifetime Value (LTV) is a great way to keep ROI coming back to you. If your customer LTV is good, you might want to keep it high to benefit from consumers’ engagement.

With this in mind, we’ll move forward to some eCommerce customer experience trends that are extremely promising for the upcoming months.

1 – Personalization

You wants your customers to feel like you care about them, right? 

The best way to ensure them you do is to offer them interactions that match their context.

By basing its campaigns on factual data, eCommerce can deliver highly personalized and relevant offers to customers throughout their lifecycle and buying journey.

This means more accurate product suggestions, tailored loyalty points, smart follow-up emails, and more, to guide your customers more easily in the journey.

Please pay attention to the fact 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal. On the other hand, 80% of them are more likely to buy from brands that offer customized experiences.

Tailoring a specific eCommerce customer experience based on customer data is no longer a futuristic idea. It is here, and people are demanding it.

2 – Flexibility

Customers expect to buy from anywhere at any time. This means providing them with:

  • A wide variety of paying methods on the checkout page
  • Search bars so customers can quickly find products they’re looking for
  • A small number of input fields in the checkout process
  • Fair price policies that don’t scare buyers away

Are these all? In fair honesty, they aren’t. Granting your customers with flexibility goes much further, and it starts with understanding what their preferences and hopes are.

The omnichannel market, for example, is growing at an impressive speed due to customers’ need to create deeper connections with brands as fast as they need to.

Whether customers want to shop online or to go in-store and have their package sent to their houses, omnichannel embraces countless opportunities across digital platforms and physical operations to deliver customized customer experiences.

This creates a competitive advantage and levels your eCommerce customer experience up.

3 – Human connection

The average Americans see from 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily. This massive advertising has contributed to making customers feel overwhelmed and make them harder to reach effectively.

When getting involved with brands, customers need to understand root-causes to allow an emotional connection. 

This isn’t something that paid ads can tell them, so eCommerce needs to take a step back and focus on organic storytelling techniques.

By focusing their attention on unique, personal brand experiences, businesses can upgrade their marketing campaigns and shopping journeys to build an outstanding eCommerce customer experience.

How does that affect your eCommerce directly? Well, this is a fantastic opportunity to use videos and live content to tell your story in an appealing way to attract and retain customers.

This is also a sign you should focus on more effective human support. 

For example, as much as people don’t mind being served by chatbots, 73% of customers still love being supported by friendly representatives who provide excellent service.

4 – Convenience

Convenience is the key to a good eCommerce customer experience, so fast and free shipping is about to become a brand differentiator.

Hitches and slowness aren’t allowed anymore and might push the demanding, time-sensitive customer away.

Let’s say your marketing team has invested time and money in delivering a campaign to attract customers to a unique sales promotion.

However, as soon as the customers engaged with your campaign get to your eCommerce, they catch themselves face to face with slow loading times, confusing pages, and unclear product descriptions.

Let’s also imagine that, as soon as customers put the products in the cart, the price previously exposed to your eCommerce suddenly increases.

Bad news: You have just wasted all the money your company invested in an effective acquisition campaign.

Studies say 14% of customers percent will begin shopping at another site when waiting for a page to load. Imagine how negatively this can affect your churn and conversion rates.

By neglecting convenience, there is a high chance your metrics towards digital initiatives might not perform the way you’re expecting them to and indicate opportunities you’re losing in the business.

Ways to improve eCommerce customer experience

There are many ways to improve your eCommerce customer experience once you decide to invest in meaningful customer-centric experiences.

One thing is universal for picking and implementing the right technologies to optimize your eCommerce customer experience: your improvements must be data-based.

This means every page and feature on your eCommerce should rely on vital customer information, such as what type of interaction your consumers prefer depending on the journey stage they’re at.

For example, have you ever considered developing a solution that allows your customers to buy from you while driving? Or delivering your products to consumers’ vehicles and other appliances?

Perhaps one of the above might make huge sense and generate even more value to your customers. But you’ll only know for certain if you rely on trustworthy customer data.

This is such a trend that customers will agree to sell their information to brands they choose. 

Whether it is their in-store movements, their location, or online browsing, customers are aware data access is essential to create personal experiences—and they’re counting on you to use it wisely to reward them with the best eCommerce experience ever.

Many eCommerce leaders and professionals worldwide have been doing that and benefiting from Customer Data Platform outcomes to personalize and elevate their eCommerce customer experience.

Improving your eCommerce customer experience with a real-time engagement platform

In the process of improving your eCommerce customer experience, you should strongly consider a few tools to help you build the best user experience.

Arena’s real-time engagement platform is the choice for you. It is equipped with Live Blog and Live Chat that can easily be embedded into your eCommerce to generate leads, increase engagement, and boost your revenue.

Keep reading to find out how both tools can optimize your eCommerce customer experience. We highly recommend checking out how Shoply leverages Arena for their Live Shopping experience.

Live Blog for eCommerce

A Live Blog is a new way to blog that embraces live content to a real-time audience.

When you live Blog, you combine different post formats and sources to create a refreshing coverage feed with the latest news towards an important event in your field. 

Live Blogs are huge in many sectors, such as sports, elections, protests, and conferences. However, these powerful engagement platforms can do much more, especially when we bring your eCommerce to the scenery.

Could you Live Blog a product launch? Sure! Could you live Blog a new promotional sale? Yes! Could you live Blog a special gathering for your loyal top-level clients? Absolutely.

Live Blogs transcend the way blogs have been building content over the years and should be adopted by eCommerce’s that care about the content they’re providing customers with.

Live Group Chat for eCommerce

Have you ever considered working on your eCommerce to embed tools that promote customer real-time interactions 24/7?

Live Chat Groups are an amazing option to achieve that!

As the name suggests, Live Chat Groups are chats that can easily be implemented on eCommerce to allow real-time conversations between your customers and representatives and your customers alone.

By implementing one on your eCommerce, you allow new types of interaction that add on more credibility to your pages and don’t make your customers wait for a response when customers reach out for you.

Live Chats have been used by support and sales teams for years, but now marketers have opened their eyes to its potential to engage and offer excellent customer experiences.

The advantages of Live Chat Groups are:

  • Availability: Consumers want businesses to be available 24/7, and Live Chat Groups are always there to prevent your customers from waiting for a response
  • Support: Sales representatives use Live Chat Groups to give customers great support, whether they’re in the checkout process or in doubt about a specific product
  • Real-time engagement: Replying quickly to customers should spare you the chance to leave them without an answer and lose them to other eCommerce on your field
  • Lead generation: Want a fast, simple tool that collects customer data and lets you smoothly guide shoppers through the customer journey? Live Chat is the answer!

As you read, consumers are expecting your next eCommerce customer experience move

We know how fast you need to implement changes that will give you quick and remarkable results. 

That is why we have decided to let you download our engagement platform for free and get started as soon as you want!

Start now and add Live Chat and Live Blog to boost your eCommerce customer experience!

How to use a Live Blog for real-time audience interaction

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A Live Blog is an instant attention-grabbing tool that empowers brands to generate real-time engagement. Here’s how some companies are using it to establish a deeper connection with their audience.

High-quality content is more important now than it has ever been.

Digitized and multi-connected, today’s audiences pay immense attention to content that can answer their questions and help them decide if a product or service is right for them. There is no denying that content is a vital part of the continuously-important customer experience.

Still, with so much competition and information running wild at all times, cutting through the noise might be challenging.

With the present moment changing so drastically in such a short period, you surely want to implement the most effective solutions to increase engagement and make your consumers loyal.

But how can you stand out from the crowd and generate immediate engagement with such an imperative audience?

I’m sure you have asked yourself this question a few times through the years.

Thankfully, this article is all about an extraordinary tool that customers are growing overly fond of and are already expecting your company to have: a Live Blog. 

Here, you will find how companies are using Live Blogs to generate relevant content and connect with a real-time audience—and why you shouldn’t wait to do the same.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Why a real-time audience matters

Customers are always on. Given the newness of technology and innovation, they have all the tools to remain connected nonstop and wish to consume reliable information that leads them to make better decisions. The faster, the better.

Timing is essential in any marketing tactic these days. A message or campaign will only be compelling when it gets to customers exactly when they need it.

Many professionals work day and night to assess customer data and come up with exciting content alternatives that arrive sharply on-time. Those who are succeeding already know it: Live content is a gold mine and engages audiences as few things can.

Live content meets consumers’ expectations perfectly because it empowers them to be part of a real-time experience. It promotes instant debates people can get involved with, combining timing and appropriate messages to create a matchless customer experience.

In this scenario, marketers are growing aware of Live Blogs and how to use them to attract their audiences and enhance customer engagement.

How are companies using Live Blogs?

Dynamic and extremely interactive, a Live Blog allows brands to bring different post formats and sources together to deliver real-time content for an instant audience. 

Live Blogs support several types of content, such as videos, audios, texts, social media posts, and more, to shape a diverse and more interactional feed.

By liveblogging, you can post regular updates of an important event that’s taking place in your field and keep your readers updated on the latest news. 

More than that, you can live meaningful stream events that interest your followers, providing them with exclusive coverage. This is way more interesting than writing about an event only after it happened and makes users spend more time on your pages instead of digesting information on Twitter or Facebook.

Giving audiences a multimedia content and narrative experience is already paying off to companies that embraced Live Blog and made it a decisive piece of their marketing communication.

We have already written about how Arena customers are using a successful Live Blog engagement strategy and revolutionizing their content. This time though, you will find a few examples to inspire you to use a Live Blog and catch real-time audience’s attention.

Winter came, and everybody watched: Game of Thrones Live Blog

Game of Thrones’ fans has always been head-over-heels for the show. 

Considering that 87% of consumers use a second screen while watching TV, giving these passionate fans the chance to follow a Live Blog that was updated as new episodes took place could only be a fantastic idea.

That was what RadioTimes did back in 2019, mixing Twitter posts, memes, soundtrack videos, and written texts to both updates and entertain its audience.

All posts were made by Huw Fullerton, a pop-culture reference that has been covering the biggest TV shows and movies for a while.

Huw was already known by the Radio Times readers, which made it easier to create connections and a sense of identification with their audience, that could cry and tremble about the episodes with someone they trusted in.

These details made Radio Times’ Game of Thrones Live Blog a success case.

Technology most giant reference: Apple Event Live Blog

With a frequently-refreshing Live Blog, Apple has allowed its customer base to get all the freshest iPhone news on its website for years. 

Not only does this take the brand closer to its niche audience, but it creates a phenomenal hype and turns the Apple Live Blog as the right place to go when customers want brand-new information.

Apple also often live streams special events to announce new products and upgraded features that create market awareness and indulge Apple fans in details they’re curious about.

However, one of the most critical and historic Apple events was the Worldwide Developers Conference 2020, which took place during the Coronavirus outbreak. 

Vehicles like The Verge even made a Live Blog of their own to debate the conference’s content and Tim Cook’s considerations about the company’s future.

Free access to political information: Debate Live Blog

Democratic debates are powerful attention-callers. People are always alert to listen to what politicians have to say, especially when they doubt whom to vote for or want a specialist’s opinion.

FiveThirtyEight is one of those websites that use liveblogging to provide readers with constant updates, so they know what goes down in debates and primaries.

FiveThirtyEight editors feed pages with texts, videos, and Twitter posts to comment on political debates. Meanwhile, the editors let users interact with intuitive graphics, polls, forecasts, and other easy-to-visualize content.

Let’s take the South Carolina Democratic Debate as an example. Notice how editors mix different contents in a timeline to give readers a broader view of the event:

It looks cool, doesn’t it? That’s one of the Live Blog advantages: To mix content and use it intelligently.

The show went on: The Voice Live Blog

NBC’s The Voice kept relevant even during the pandemic. Coaches and contenders changed the already familiar The Voice studio for their homes. GoldDerby commented on Season 18’s finale to engage readers with a broad, real-time Live Blog feeding.

The Voice Live Blog used a more straightforward format approach, posting only short texts to update its visitors. 

Still, live blogging was a smart way to promote GoldDerby’s online prediction program. Winning users got a special place in the Live Blog leaderboard, along with a $100 Amazon Card—see how Live Blog is generating engagement here?

GoldDerby also provided users with a commentary section so they could voice their thoughts on The Voice finale. This was essential to grant readers an exclusive place to comment on their favorite show and create a unique sense of community people don’t usually find on social media

Live Original Blog

Interactive content is very much like the future’s face: it brings people together and gives a human, personal touch that keeps them interested in what you have to say.

Through the years, Live Blogs have evolved and become fantastic channels for folks who watch live sports games, real-time protests, technology conferences, etc.

Despite that, Live Blogs can still do so much more.

For example, in fashion retail companies, Live Blogs can be used to cover special events that matter in the field, such as fashion runaways and even music festivals.

Covering noteworthy events might not only make your brand stand out from the competition, but it will also give you the chance to transform your content to smartly address your audiences’ concerns and point them in the right direction.

If you’re interested in learning more about a Live Blog’s potential, we have numbered 30 Live Blog benefits and why you should pay more attention to your marketing strategy.

Since we know how much difference a Live Blog can make, it would be selfish not to share other Live Blog ideas you can adjust and use in your company.

More ideas for your Live Blog strategy

Arena has been helping companies from several sectors worldwide to build and execute robust Live Blog strategies that skyrocket customer engagement and provide exclusive content.

Want to figure out how? Come along!

1. Launch products — and let people know immediately 

Covering a real-time launch event is always interesting because people are more than ready to be the first to know.

The sooner you give your audience the news, the more educated and confident they will feel.

Let people see what your new products are about and educate them on why they need to buy from you instead of your competitors.

2. Add your own commentary to a conference 

There are certainly a few exciting events in your field that your audience is dying to see. Take the chance to live to blog them and add your own personal touch to the coverage.

3. Live blog during a crisis

Live Blogs become critically important in crisis times when real-time information can influence what readers plan to do next.

This became very clear with the Coronavirus outbreak. Try googling “Coronavirus Live Blog.” You should probably find websites like NBC Bay Area’s, which publishes all the real-time information available in a single place to keep readers updated and safe.

4. Drive traffic to your Live Blog

We know social media is the to-go place when news breaks, but a Live Blog can change that.

Although it is essential to use social media to connect with your audience, having a Live Blog will drive more traffic to your digital properties. Like that, you should depend less on external algorithms and take your audience ownership back to your website.

5. Widen your audience

When you decide to invest in a Live Blog, attracting attention to it is crucial. Start by spreading the news and creating the right buzz towards it.

This will widen your audience and make the most interested people stick around to keep you company.

6. Feel more human to your readers

When aligned with your branding voice, Live Blogs are the perfect place for you to talk about your brand, speak your point of view, and feel more human to your readers.

Remember the Game of Thrones Live Blog? It used a reference to shed light on the show and humanize the Live Blog feed with someone’s actual opinions. And people love that.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

7. Let users interact on your Live Blog

This is essential. People won’t feel like they belong and can be part of the experience if you don’t give them a special place to interact and be active.

Whether you implement a Live Chat Group or a commentary section on your Live Blog, allow readers to express themselves. You’ll see how this stimulates organic engagement and encourages users to come back for more.

Your content strategy is incomplete without a Live Blog

But it doesn’t have to be.

Now that you’ve seen such inspiring examples and ideas, it is time to take the next step and benefit from the many wonders of a Live Blog.

Without the perfect platform to embed on your website, you might miss out on some special features to leverage your website and guarantee your events will be successful.

You want a Live Blog platform that’s intuitive both to your crew and your readers and makes the most out of the investments you’re making.

Arena is ready to optimize and monetize your editorial work with a superb Live Blog tool that is easy to embed and plugged into your WordPress page. It is SEO friendly, scalable, and works on any website.

Ready to get started? Claim your free trial and try Arena’s Live Blog solution!

Real-time Audience Live Blog to Connect and Engage

Posted on by

A Live Blog is an instant attention-grabbing tool that empowers brands to generate real-time engagement. Here’s how some companies are using it to establish a deeper connection with their audience.

High-quality content is more important now than it has ever been.

Digitized and multi-connected, today’s audiences pay significant attention to content that can answer their questions and help them decide if a product or service is right. There is no denying that content is a vital part of the continuously-important customer experience.

With so much competition and information running wild at all times, cutting through the noise might be hard.

With the present moment changing so drastically in such a short period, you surely want to implement the most effective solutions to increase engagement and make your consumers loyal.

But how can you stand out from the crowd and generate immediate engagement with such an imperative audience?

I’m sure you have asked yourself this question a few times through the years.

Thankfully, this article is all about an extraordinary tool that customers are growing extremely fond of and are already expecting your company to have: a Live Blog. 

Here, you will find how companies are using Live Blogs to generate relevant content and connect with a real-time audience—and why you shouldn’t wait to do the same.

Why a real-time audience matters

Customers are always on. Given the newness of technology and innovation, they have all the tools to remain connected nonstop and wish to consume reliable information that leads them to make better decisions. The faster, the better.

Timing is essential in any marketing tactic these days. A message or campaign will only be valid when it gets to customers exactly when they need it.

Many professionals work day and night to assess customer data and develop exciting content alternatives that arrive sharply on-time. Those who are succeeding already know it: Live content is a gold mine and engages audiences as few things can.

Live content meets consumers’ expectations perfectly because it empowers them to be part of a real-time experience. It promotes instant debates people can get involved with, combining timing and appropriate messages to create a matchless customer experience.

In this scenario, marketers are growing aware of Live Blogs and how to attract their audiences and enhance customer engagement.

How are companies using Live Blogs?

Dynamic and extremely interactive, a Live Blog allows brands to bring different post formats and sources to deliver real-time content for an instant audience.

Live Blogs support several types of content, such as videos, audios, texts, social media posts, and more, to shape a different and more interactional feed.

By liveblogging, you can post regular updates of a relevant event that’s taking place in your field and keep your readers updated on the latest news.

More than that, you can live meaningful stream events that interest your followers, providing them with exclusive coverage. This is way more interesting than writing about an event only after it happened.

It makes users spend more time on your pages instead of digesting information on Twitter or Facebook.

Giving audiences a multimedia content and narrative experience already pays off to companies that embraced Live Blog and made it a crucial part of their marketing communication.

We have already written about how Arena customers are using a successful Live Blog engagement strategy and revolutionizing their content. This time, you will find a few examples to inspire you to use a Live Blog and catch real-time audience’s attention.

Winter came, and everybody watched: Game of Thrones Live Blog

Game of Thrones’ fans has always been head-over-heels for the show.

Considering that 87% of consumers use a second screen while watching TV, giving these passionate fans the chance to follow a Live Blog that was updated as new episodes could only be a fantastic idea.

That was what RadioTimes did back in 2019, mixing Twitter posts, memes, soundtrack videos, and written texts to both updates and entertain its audience.

All posts were made by Huw Fullerton, a pop-culture reference covering the biggest TV shows and movies for a while.

Huw was already known by the Radio Times readers, which made it easier to create connections and a sense of identification with their audience, that could cry and tremble about the episodes with someone they trusted in.

These details made Radio Times’ Game of Thrones Live Blog a success case.

Technology biggest reference: Apple Event Live Blog

With a frequently-refreshing Live Blog, Apple has allowed its customer base to get all the freshest iPhone news on its website for years. 

This takes the brand closer to its niche audience, but it creates a phenomenal hype and turns the Apple Live Blog as the right place to go when customers want brand-new information.

Apple also often live streams special events to announce new products and upgraded features that create market awareness and indulge Apple fans in details they’re curious about.

One of the most critical and historic Apple events was the Worldwide Developers Conference 2020, which took place during the Coronavirus outbreak. 

Vehicles like The Verge even made a Live Blog of their own to debate the conference’s content and Tim Cook’s considerations about the company’s future.

Free access to political information: Debate Live Blog

Democratic debates are powerful attention-callers. People are always alert to what politicians have to say, especially when they’re in doubt about whom to vote for or want a specialist’s opinion.

FiveThirtyEight is one of those websites that use liveblogging to provide readers with constant updates, so they know what goes down in debates and primaries.

FiveThirtyEight editors feed pages with texts, videos, and Twitter posts to comment on political debates. Meanwhile, the editors let users interact with intuitive graphics, polls, forecasts, and other easy-to-visualize content.

Let’s take the South Carolina Democratic Debate as an example. Notice how editors mix different contents in a timeline to give readers a broader view of the event:

It looks cool, doesn’t it? That’s one of the Live Blog advantages: To mix content and use it intelligently.

The show went on: The Voice Live Blog

NBC’s The Voice kept relevant even during the pandemic. Coaches and contenders changed the already familiar The Voice studio for their homes, and GoldDerby commented on Season 18’s finale to engage interested readers with a broad, real-time Live Blog feeding.

The Voice Live Blog used a more straightforward format approach, posting only short texts to update the page’s visitors.

Still, live blogging was a smart way to promote GoldDerby’s online prediction program. Winning users got a special place in the Live Blog leaderboard, along with a $100 Amazon Card—see how Live Blog is generating engagement here?

GoldDerby also provided users with a commentary section so they could voice their thoughts on The Voice finale. This was essential to grant readers an exclusive place to comment on their favorite show and create a unique sense of community people don’t usually find on social media.

Live Original Blog

Interactive content is like the face of the future: it brings people together and gives a human, personal touch that keeps them interested in what you have to say.

Through the years, Live Blogs have evolved and become excellent channels for folks that watch live sports games, real-time protests, technology conferences, and so on.

Despite that, Live Blogs can still do so much more.

For example, in fashion retail companies, Live Blogs can be used to cover special events that matter in the field, such as fashion runaways and even music festivals.

Covering noteworthy events might make your brand stand out from the competition, but it will also give you the chance to transform your content to smartly address your audiences’ concerns and point them in the right direction.

If you’re interested in learning more about a Live Blog’s potential, we have numbered 30 Live Blog benefits and why you should pay more attention to it for your marketing strategy.

Since we know how much difference a Live Blog can make, it would be selfish not to share other Live Blog ideas you can adjust and use in your company.

More ideas for your Live Blog strategy

Arena has been helping companies from several sectors worldwide build and execute robust Live Blog strategies that skyrocket customer engagement and provide exclusive content.

Want to figure out how? Come along!

  • Launch products — and let people know immediately 

Covering a real-time launch event is always exciting because people are more than ready to be the first to know.

The sooner you give your audience the news, the more educated and confident they will feel.

Let people see what your new products are about and educate them on why they need to buy from you instead of your competitors.

  • Add your commentary to a conference 

There are certainly a few exciting events in your field that your audience is dying to see. Take the chance to live to blog them and add your personal touch to the coverage.

  • Live blog during a crisis

Live Blogs become critically important in times of crisis when real-time information can influence what readers plan to do next.

This became very clear with the Coronavirus outbreak. Try googling “Coronavirus Live Blog,” and you should probably find websites like NBC Bay Area’s, that publishes all the real-time information available in a single place to keep readers updated and safe.

  • Drive traffic to your Live Blog

We know social media is the to-go place when news break—but a Live Blog can change that.

Although it is essential to use social media to connect with your audience, having a Live Blog will drive more traffic to your digital properties. Like that, you should depend less on external algorithms and take your audience ownership back to your website.

When you decide to invest in a Live Blog, attracting attention to it is crucial. Start by spreading the news and creating the right buzz towards it.

This will widen your audience and make the most interested people stick around to keep you company.

  • Feel more human to your readers

When aligned with your branding voice, Live Blogs are the perfect place for you to talk about your brand, speak your point of view, and feel more human.

Remember the Game of Thrones Live Blog? It used a reference to shed light on the show and humanize the Live Blog feed with someone’s actual opinions. And people love that.

  • Let users interact on your Live Blog

This is essential. People won’t feel like they belong and can be part of the experience if you don’t give them a special place to interact and be active.

Whether you implement a Live Chat Group or a commentary section on your Live Blog, allow readers to express themselves. You’ll see how this stimulates organic engagement and encourages users to come back for more.

Your content strategy is incomplete without a Live Blog

But it doesn’t have to be.

Now that you’ve seen inspiring examples and ideas, it is time to take the next step and benefit from the many wonders of a Live Blog.

Without the perfect platform to embed on your website, you might miss out on some unique features to leverage your website and guarantee your events will be successful.

You want a Live Blog platform that’s intuitive to your crew and your readers and makes the most out of the investments you’re making.

Arena is ready to optimize and monetize your editorial work with a superb Live Blog tool that is easy to embed and can be plugged into your WordPress page. It is SEO friendly, scalable, and works on any website.

Ready to get started? Claim your free trial and try Arena’s Live Blog solution!

9 reasons why you should start doing it

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Being all ears to your customers has amazing benefits. It increases customer acquisition and makes them brand loyal. It also improves branding strategies and gives you powerful insights about your industry, connecting you to new market opportunities.

If you don’t want to miss out on these benefits, you better start embracing social listening. 

Reputation is critical to any company that is willing to increase customer loyalty and build confidence in the market. With the many digital channels that allow conversations between customers and brands, organizations from the B2C and B2B sectors work hard to be positively recognized by potential and current clients. One efficient way of generating awareness is to have a strong social media presence and reach out to customers with helpful and engaging interactions.

Still, these interactions can only be valuable if brands are ready to actively listen instead of guessing what people want. 

When customers talk to you, whether they’re feeling good or bad about your brand, they expect you to talk back accurately. The last thing you want is to make them feel like you don’t care about what they have to say – or that you’re not making any effort to understand what they mean.

And that is why you should start using social listening.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the act of monitoring your brand’s social media accounts and channels to search for customer feedback and give appropriate responses. 

In order to social listen, you firstly need to track your brand’s mentions and discussions, which can be done by social media monitoring tools. Only then, you’ll manage to do its core task: analyze conversations’ context to make better and more proactive communication decisions.

Think about an ordinary conversation. When someone talks to you, you listen before replying, right? You do that because you know dialogues and interactions won’t make sense unless you assimilate what’s being stated. When it comes to brands and consumers communicating with each other, the line of thought is the same.

By being an active social listener, you’ll be able to reply to some very important questions: Why are people talking about you? Where and how are they doing it? What do they truly want? How can you connect with them?

These questions can lead to a powerful understanding of how to improve content for your customers, create better relationships with your followers, and increase consumer satisfaction.

We separate social listening into four important actions: find, listen, understand, and take action.

  • By finding, you monitor and track the right places and discussions that gravitate around your brand.
  • By listening, you pay attention to what is being said.
  • By understanding, you address issues that are being presented and collect important feedback.
  • By taking action, you work on solutions that will remedy the situation and make your customers happier.

Practice makes perfect, so make sure you find, listen, understand, and take action continuously.

Why is social listening important?

When customers talk, they’re doing an amazing job for you. Their feedback lets you know what you should keep and what you should change in your business. If you listen clearly to consumers and give them what they need in return, they will remember you for solving their problems. Now, try ignoring customers to see how bad it can get. An unresponsive customer service approach will cost you a high number of consumers that will never do business with your brand again.

A bad brand reputation can be a way to downfall, and we are not exaggerating. Remember what happened to Kodak? It once led the photographic film market but failed to understand people were growing more and more fond of digital photography and went bankrupt. 

We have to emphasize that customer-centric cultures have never been so popular. By putting customers at the center of everything they do, these cultures put efforts into anticipating consumers’ needs and creating proactive strategies to give them what they want: new products, services, loyalty programs, and much more.

Information is everywhere and anywhere and it’s vital to track your brand’s social media to try and be wary of what people are saying about and to you. And that is the very least.

9 reasons why you should use social listening

Ahead, we give you detailed reasons why you should embrace social listening to proactively respond to your followers and consumers.

1. Customers expect you to speak out accordingly

Responsiveness is very important, as your audience expects you to speak out when relevant discussions and events take place. In 2018, a survey made by Clutch discovered that 76% of people expect brands to reply on social media. When we talk about millennials, 80% of takers expect brands to reply and 90% want to get an answer on the same day.

However, recall that an inappropriate response will only frustrate your customers, no matter how fast you’re able to reply.

If you want to make your clients brand loyal and boost customer retention, you better start replying accordingly to what they say — and, by accordingly, we mean you have to thoughtfully understand your customers’ issues to shape valuable responses. Keep this in mind: replying is good, but replying accordingly is what social listening is all about.

2. Have a better understanding of your audience

One of the many reasons organizations keep clear interactions with consumers is to generate and gather high-perspective data that maps their concerns and issues. Social listening will guide you to big pictures that exemplify your consumers’ concerns and how you can act on them.

Combined with the need to have a better audience understanding, social listening offers fresh data to get audience insights related to the public perception of your brand, from competitive analysis — whether in brand or product level — to how marketing campaigns resonate.

By social listening, you can identify demographics, preferences, and customer behaviors as much as the general sentiment about your brand. Once you have tangible reports, you can analyze qualitative data and leverage it to grow your brand strategy and take action.

We will sound obvious, but it’s true: your social listening data will only be valuable if you know what to do with it. For this reason, it is essential to set up a frequency to investigate the information you’re getting and think about how you’ll keep track of the results from time to time.

3. Monitor new industry opportunities

Is there anything that’s trending in your industry that you should know? Any social issue related to your brand that needs to be addressed? Any gap in your sector that people are talking about? Any questions from customers that you can answer better than your competitors? Social listening can help you find the answers to these questions. 

By tracking industry buzzwords and trends, social listening will bring you precious insights about your area of expertise and shed light on discussions that can be amazing opportunities for your brand. That is an efficient way to keep a hear out for market trends, discover what’s lacking in your industry and what you can do to innovate and attract more customers. 

4. Keep track of your brand’s health

Social listening is an effective way of developing better elements that shape your brand in customers’ minds. As soon as you continuously keep track of what people say on the internet, you’re able to make sense of what and how users would like your brand to communicate. Attentively listening to consumers’ feedback is essential to come up with interesting brand strategies.

Social listening is also an excellent way of providing constant investigation towards bad reviews and comments that can affect your brand negatively. Never forget that anything can go viral on social media. Unhappy customers and displeased staff members know they can freely express themselves on online networks and be heard. Social channels empower their voices and reach people who might be going through the same issues. With that in mind, it is completely possible that a single complaint could be reinforced by others and create unwanted attention. 

Being ready to address brand disasters and manage a crisis isn’t overreacting in this fast-paced environment we call the internet — and, trust us, you’ll be glad to have the right tools and tactics to deal with harmful posts and remedy the damage. 

It’s true that you won’t be able to control everything people say about your brand, but you can control how you react to it and mitigate the negative impact. Learn with your previous experiences and prepare not to just reply to undesirable controversy, but to avoid it before it happens. For example, if your launch sales were affected because your website was down, you better start looking for infrastructure tests that will strengthen your website and avoid outages. 

5. Increase customer acquisition 

Another reason you should embrace social listening is that data provided by it will lead you to create content people care about. When you start shaping your content to followers’ preferences, chances are you’ll attract more users that connect with you and have a genuine interest in what you have to say. 

You already know it — expressing your brand message in social media through responses, hashtags, live streaming, and more, calls the attention of content viewers and make it easier for you to convert them into leads. This works better than driving traffic through ads to people who have never heard of you before.

Pay attention to what audiences are looking for and what type of content they enjoy viewing and sharing. Photos, videos, mentions, polls… All of these are instruments you can use to increase customer acquisition smartly and more humanly.

Quick example: Netflix is one of the top-references for brands that want to stand out on social media and attract public attention. With unique humor, Netflix memes its own shows, retweets Netflix-related posts made by followers, and replies with a tone its audience can positively connect with. 

6. Keep old customers engaged

It is quite simple to understand how social listening can help you maintain old customers engaged and retained. If you ignore what consumers say when they reach out to you, it shows you don’t care about their experiences. By neglecting them, you’re paving the way for your customers to switch for competitors that are ready to offer valuable interactions.

Recall that many consumers’ stories are being told on social media, especially those where customers need your support. It isn’t unusual for clients to reach out to brands on Twitter or Instagram to get an issue addressed. Actually, they message and mention your brand on those channels because they expect you to reply and solve their problems quickly. No one has the time and patience it takes to hang on the line anymore. The good news is that social listening can absolutely help you to excel at fast, assertive support, and keep old customers engaged.

Engaged customers are more likely to be brand loyal, especially when you can keep meaningful interactions going on and offer them what quench their thirst for information, interactivity, and good customer experience.

7. Address common issues

If the same questions are made by your customers over and over, how can you make it easier for them to find the answer? If a considerable number of buyers are complaining about the same products, how can you give them a detailed, honest assessment of the problem? These are more questions you can wisely reply to by social listening.

If the big picture tells you your customers have the same common issues, maybe it is time to find out how to solve those issues and respond effectively to them.

Monitoring social media accounts to find these types of problems can make you arrive earlier in the game to prevent more consumers from being affected and provide the right solution to solve the issues of those who have already reached out for support.

8. Get quick feedback

From knowing how you can improve your products to where your audience is willing to communicate with you, feedback can give you constructive criticism about mostly anything. 

Launched a new product? Want to know how your brand positioning is doing? Have doubts if the last live event you promoted is matching your followers’ expectations? What people post on social media will certainly help you get a clear idea about those, and more.

Plus, if customers are talking about something that’s not working, you should be the first to know. Make sure to take their considerations into account and acknowledge their feedback, then start working on what will fix the problem. A new feature? A new product? A new campaign? Getting feedback — and, most importantly, fast feedback — will help you find your consumers’ pain points and understand how to solve them.

Quick example: Starbucks recently released an open letter based on a user’s negative feedback regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. After social listening to the critique, Starbucks used a respectful tone and gave an immediate solution to what the customer was talking about, showing how its employees can now support the movements while working. 

Don’t forget that positive feedback is important too. If customers love a campaign or the tone you’re using to reply to them, make sure you get it to generate more content that will match their preferences.

9. Identify influencers and user-generated content

You won’t be surprised by the fact social networks are full of potential influencers that can help you promote your brand — or threat it. Remember that even people who only had good experiences with your brand can be influenced if someone important they follow feels bad about you (and good about your competitors).

Another social listening advantage is that it allows you to track user-generated content to keep your followers updated. Being continuously connected to monitor what digital influencers say and do will lead you to understand who you can partner with. Search for hashtags, keywords, accounts, and more to keep your brand aware of what’s going on in real-time. You can also start mapping people who your audience connects with and listen to what they say so you don’t miss out on collaboration opportunities.

The role of social listening on live streaming

It’s no secret to you that people love when you go live and cover news and events as they happen. Live streaming has become extremely popular in the last years and it is a gold mine for brands that want to keep relevant by connecting with customers in real-time. The spectator customer profile is being replaced by the active customer, who wants to join brands in emotional and thrilling experiences.

But how do live events and streaming connect with social listening? Well, social listening is a powerful tool when it comes to combining the right strategies to go live.

From sports games to elections, live streams are effective event coverage mechanisms that allow customers to participate in what’s going on even if they’re far away. Meanwhile, social listening uses social streams to monitor and interpret the viewers’ behavior and comments to get insights.

When done right, social listening can be unbeatable in content creation. The reason why is that live streaming gives you engaging methods, such as live discussions and Q&As, that will transform into data — and, as you know, social listening will turn data into action. 

At Arena, we recognize the power of social listening in social streams and event monitoring.

Our social monitoring stream tool publishes content from different sources automatically or manually and provides results coming in real-time. You can adapt filters and search parameters to improve results and post the freshest content to engage your audience. Besides, our social stream feature easily integrates your search stream with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and more personalized RSS feeds.

[Real case example]

Grow your brand by social listening

We’re a bit biased, it’s true, but Arena is ready to empower companies to grow their audience in their websites by creating meaningful live experiences.

So, if you’re considering having a social monitoring stream and finding interactive ways to get in touch with your followers, we recommend you keep an eye on ongoing discussions related to your brand and make your own website the go-to place for relevant, instantaneous content.

It’s easier to be an authority in your field when you’re able to mix different sources and formats automatically into your website, all while providing your customer with an exclusive space for debating and chatting. Fortunately, we have the perfect tool that will do that for you.

A live blog will give your brand the chance to use a smart variety of tools to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.

By using it, you can publish news to your website as they happen, all while adding users’ reactions from social media and witnessing in-progress-discussions on live chats. Our tool is highly customizable and handles in-feed comments, connects with your video platform, creates polls, and posts social content that engages and keeps your followers updated.

Join us and be able to:

  • Increase time spent on your website
  • Let users engage with your posts
  • Automate content distribution
  • Cover field events that matter to your customers

From bloggers to large enterprises, from Oscars to Super Bowl, Arena is ideal to manage any type of live experience and to help you grow your brand by social listening.

Want to capture audience attention and feed your followers with fresh content at all times? Learn more about the subject in our Live Blog article!

Listen to your audience – and take back its ownership

When talking to your spectators and customers, you assume they’ll talk back to you. This dialog and communication are what, for the most part, define audience engagement.

In general, the question “what is audience engagement” has many different answers, but all of them will lead to the same essence. Keep reading to learn our Ultimate Guide to Audience Engagement.

Complete guide to Customer Experience

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Customer experience is one of the new frontiers of marketing. Customers, in the market powered by industry 4.0, are more interested in the experience than in the product itself. In fact, according to a research held by Momentum Worldwide in 2019, 76% of the participants declared to prefer experiences over things. 

This is closer to our own lives than you might think. Have you ever felt so well treated by a company that you eventually became their client for life? Or that a salesperson seemed to know your needs so well that you made an impulse purchase right on the spot? 

On the other hand, have you ever found it so hard to navigate a website that you couldn’t find or buy what you wanted? Or had to wait so long for technical support on a product or service you bought that you never used that company again, nor recommended it to anyone?

All of those situations have to do with the same business aspect: Customer Experience. Miles away from that simple and old idea of mere customer service, it is one of the biggest marketing trends today. And it involves reconfiguring your whole business around the idea of providing a customer with what he wants and needs, before he or she even knows they might need it.

Want to know more of how that works? Don’t worry, we got a simple and complete guide to help you improve your “CX” in no time.

What is Customer Experience and why is it important?

Customer Experience, also known as CX, is the summary of every physical or virtual interaction a customer has with your business. It is the sum of what defines his or her perception of your brand, starting from the very first contact up to their level of satisfaction at the end of their experience.

Simply put, CX is one of the most fundamental parts of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because it is what will decide if any individual that comes in contact with your business will become a repeat and loyal customer. 

From your website usability to how your employee treated them, and how satisfied they were with your product, every piece of the puzzle will define how happy your brand made them – and, most importantly, if they are willing to come back.  

In addition, a happy customer is not only a loyal one. Oracle conducted a global study in which 74% of senior executives stated a good experience will make customers become advocates for your business. 

Not only will they come back, but they will talk about you with their friends, family, coworkers. They will recommend you, defend you, and bring you new business. They will become your marketing tool.

The importance of CX can be summed up in a simple idea: without customers, you don’t have a business. And an American Express research found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. This is why your main focus should be on investing in that experience, so you retain the ones you have, while also attracting new ones. 

Why should your business focus on CX?

In an ever more scattered and competitive market, Customer Experience is set to be the defining factor that makes someone opt for your brand, and not another. A third of customers will quit buying from a business after their first bad experience. On the other hand, half of them are likely to splurge on an impulse purchase if they receive a personalized treatment from an employee, or even an online interface.

And if a customer rates your company 10/10 on a satisfaction level, he or she will probably spend more than twice as much on your brand. Their  loyalty may last for over five years. When you are happy with a product or a service, you don’t quit them.

Talking in money figures, according to a study by the Temkin Group, businesses that make US$1 billion a year can increase that number by US$ 700 million in three years, simply by investing in CX. The reason is, by doing that, they attain higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and, consequently, increased revenues.

If you want to make that kind of money, that means you cannot ignore your customer needs, their emails, feedback, queries, and expectations. You have to listen, understand, and act based on what they tell you.

That is why a Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that great customer experience is a top strategic objective right now for any kind of company. It is the most effective way to beat your competitors, and get your customer to not only come back and spend more, but to become your marketing tool, through word-of-mouth, positive online reviews, and recommendations to their friends and acquaintances. 

Is customer experience the same thing as customer service?

Absolutely not! Customer service is when a potential client interacts with one of your employees, in a store, online, or on the phone, for example. And that is just one part of the customer experience.

If you go to a restaurant, and your order is served quickly, and tastes delicious, that is good customer service. But if you become a regular at that particular restaurant, the chef knows that you are allergic to onions, and does not use them in your food without you even having to ask, that is great customer service.

Because that is the heart, the central element, of CX: seeing and treating your customer as a human, an individual, and not a simple source of money. Customer experience is all about providing a human and authentic connection, one that does not feel run-of-the-mill, nor a script from a production line. It feels unique and personal.

Technology today, such as a CRM software, has made it possible for that individual experience to be executed in many different ways. Predicting future purchases and needs based on the customer’s history, or delivering targeted email marketing campaigns are good examples. However, it is still about seeing each one of them as an individual, listening to them, and anticipating their expectations and needs.

That does not mean customer service is not important. On the contrary. Providing assistance, answering every email, complaint, or question – and quickly – is more imperative than ever. But that is only one part of your customer experience, that has to start positively from the homepage of your website and last long after a purchase is made. 

What makes for a good customer experience?

Exactly because good CX must feel personal and unique, there are no automatic formulas or guaranteed recipes. The one key element that is at the beginning of every good customer experience is: listen.

Know how to listen

Listening to what your customers are saying to your business, and about your business, must be your top priority. Every feedback, email, technical support call, or online review must not only be dealt with quickly, but also used as raw material to create a strategy in reducing friction and providing better and more personalized service for your customers.

Have a good system

In order to do that, a system that puts all that feedback and information together, and analyzes it, is essential. The logic is simple: create channels that make it possible for your customer to tell you what he/she wants, likes, or does not like, acknowledge and understand their demands; then act on them.

If you are not doing that, the alternative result is quite clear. Your complaint and purchase lines are clogged, and your customer is frustrated with long waiting times – which is the number one cause of bad customer experience. 

The dialogue does not flow organically because your employee does not understand what your customer needs – which may make your employee’s frustration come off as rude or angry. Consequently, your client support is left with many unresolved issues and complaints. And your customer is dissatisfied with automated responses, and the lack of a personal, human, component. Those are all the roots of bad, or terrible, CX.

Mock up your typical consumer

Know, though, that it’s not easy. Most companies still don’t provide good or excellent customer service. In order to change that, your CX policy must come from the top of the chain, expressed in clear and public guidelines, available and known by everyone in your business.

For example, create personas, so your employees know whom they will be dealing with. Provide training for those same workers. And listen to their feedback, too. They are the ones on the frontline, so they are in an ideal position to see and feel what your company might be doing right or wrong – and how to improve it.

Always ask questions

Finally, never hesitate to ask questions. Use your chat platforms to better know your customers and their current experience with your brand. Follow those conversations up with emails. If necessary, outbound calls are not off the table. 

And remember: it’s all about empathy. Emotions play a huge part in customer experience. It is precisely the emotions that will determine if your customer wants to remain in business with you or not. 

But how do I measure if all of this is working?

Measuring and analyzing is one of the most challenging parts of customer experience. That is why a number of different metrics and tools were created to assess the quality level of CX in a particular company.

With them, it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of specific strategies, as well as how they improve or not the customer’s perception of, and relationship with, your brand. The four CX measuring tools that are most used in the market today are listed in the following topics.  

Customer Effort Score (CES)

It measures how easy, or difficult, a consumer’s experience with one of your products or services was. Here’s how it works: a customer made a purchase on your website, for example, and you wish to know how easy it was for him or her to navigate the e-commerce platform. 

So you send a CES survey after they are finished, asking questions like “How easy was it to complete your online purchase”, or “to navigate our website”, with a rating scale from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’. Pretty straightforward.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

We all have answered a Net Promoter Score survey before. It measures a customer’s loyalty score, by asking a variation of the “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” question.

In addition to being very simple and straightforward, that numerical score is a quite good assessment of customer experience. That is why the metric, created by Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld at Bain and Company, is favored by many boards and executive committees, being one of the most used by businesses in the world today.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

While Net Promoter Score evaluates the satisfaction with the whole brand, CSAT surveys the customer’s experience with a specific product or service. The metric system, though, is pretty much the same, usually providing a scale from 1 to 5 or 7 – where 1 is very unsatisfied, and 5/7 is very satisfied. A yes or no answer may also be used, however.

Due to its specificity, and for how it makes possible to analyze each different point in the customer experience chain separately, most CX leaders in the world choose CSAT as their top metric.

Time to resolution (TTR)

One of the main sources of customer frustration, and bad experience, is waiting a long time to get a response. For that reason, TTR is a very important metric. It measures, in average, how long it takes for a customer’s issue or ticket to be solved by a company’s brand after it’s been open. 

The result may be provided in days or business hours, being the product of the whole sum of time spent in resolution divided by how many tickets and issues were solved. The logic here is pretty obvious: shorten your TTR as much as possible, if you want to increase the likability of having return business from a customer. 

CX trends

Good Customer Experience results all over the world have come from companies who have been following a certain set of practices. The first one is that they are customer-centric, instead of profit-centric. 

That means their top priority is providing an outstanding experience, focusing more on retaining and satisfying their current customers than on attracting new ones at any cost. Second is that good CX usually comes from old school methods. Yes, again: human interaction. 

Companies that privilege one-on-one personal conversations over chatbots, market research (such as customer calls) over predictive analytics and social media, as well as investing in talent on board, often present the best customer experience results. It is not about being state of the art, or overtly technological, but about the willingness to provide good, satisfying service.

Number 3 is something we have already said, but can never overstate: these companies are listening. The base for their CX strategies is the feedback from their customers. Not only they collect it, but they have put systems in place to properly analyze it, and turn the conclusions into action.

Next, they acknowledged the importance of their employees in implementing good customer experience. Not only did they provide specific and individual training, based on different departments’ and workers’ needs, but they also got all their workforce involved in their CX strategy effort.

Finally, no matter how well they are doing, Customer Experience leaders in the globe keep increasing their investment on CX initiatives.

So, how do I Improve my CX strategy?

A good CX strategy consists of guidelines and actions that start from the very top and involve the whole company. It must be assimilated by every employee because to a greater or lesser extent, they will all eventually play a role in the customer’s experience of your brand.

These guidelines and actions must come from a very simple customer-centric principle: make your employees understand they should treat a customer the same way they would like to be treated by any business. 

In order to do that, make your customer feedback – that same one you already collected and properly analyzed – available for everyone in your team. Let them see and know how they can improve those experiences you have surveyed.

And that is ever more effective the sooner it starts. Your workers should be informed of your customer policy as soon as they are hired. And through training and support, they must be updated and refreshed on those practices as often as possible.

There are two powerful tools that you can incorporate to your strategy and will make your brand step up its game regarding customer experience. We are talking about live blogs and live chats. 

Live chats

Most companies use live chats as a customer service channel. But did you know it is also possible to use this tool to generate an experience for our consumer? 

Some platforms, such as Arena, allow you to create live group chats. This means your audience will be able to comment on your event, exchange impressions and also very valuable information. 

Depending on the profile of your audience, you can promote this space as a powerful networking opportunity for them to connect with people who have similar interests and valuable contributions for them both personally and professionally. 

On the other hand, you, as a brand, will receive immediate feedback from your customers. This will allow you to know exactly what they like and dislike, which gives you the opportunity to redefine your course of action immediately. As a consequence, you will offer an even better experience to your audience, making them loyal to your brand and the content you produce.

This is customer experience to its core, generating true value for your public and allowing your brand to be a vector for meaningful relationships. 

Live blogging

Live blogging is a new approach to content marketing. As the name suggests, these are platforms that allow you to create content as a particular event or set of events unfold. It gives your audience (or public, as you might want to call) a chance to have access to things they otherwise wouldn’t. 

There are basically two ways in which you can use live blogging. The first one is to provide a full coverage of an event. This means that people who haven’t been able to attend feel like they are actually participating. Big tech events make full use of this technology for this kind of use. 

The second way in which you can benefit from live blogging is to broaden your user’s experience. Let’s say, for example, your company is promoting a big event with celebrities and big names of the area. 

In this situation, you can use a live blogging strategy to grant access to the backstage or to have specialists commenting on the theme of the event. You can also directly interact with your audience by publishing trivias and reposting what they have been saying about the event online. 

Live blogging is a fine way to deliver a greater customer experience to your public. By adopting this technology, you are giving them the opportunity to have access to exclusive content, personalised interaction and relevant content. 

Lastly, because it all comes down to this, and you have to remind yourself of that every day, all the time: in order to provide a great customer experience, listen to your customer and their feedback. 

Create channels so they can speak to you. Listen to what they want, need, like, and don’t like. Use that in your favor. Engage in the conversation, ask questions, try to understand them better.

In short: see them as human, as an individual, as your business partner. Speak their language, with them, not to them. And be quick. Don’t make them wait. Nobody likes to wait.

If you want to start testing some of the tools that will allow your brand to offer an even better customer experience, here’s what you can do: create an account at Arena and implement our freemium version of the live blog and live chat!   

Liveblogging: a Successful Engagement Strategy

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Liveblogging helps companies to generate a high-quality content experience that widens their audience and increases true engagement in real-time. It is the right tool to empower the ownership of audiences, automate content distribution, and boost revenue.

In today’s breaking news cycle, there’s no room for being slow and buggy. More than ever, people want to know what’s going on as soon as occurrences take place. Besides, physical space is no longer a barrier. Immediacy and urgency must be answered with instant involvement, no matter where people are. That means that, if you’re making your audience wait, you’re in trouble.

If your company provides any type of content in this fast and ever-changing environment, you already know what’s obvious: in order to make readers spend more time on your website, you need to be relevant and deliver news in a more dynamic way.

And that is why your company should have a live blog strategy.

What is a Live Blog?

A live blog is a customer engagement platform that allows companies to bring together different forms of content to create high-quality and real-time experiences to their audience. This kind of platform makes it possible to embed videos, images, texts, and audios from live streaming and social media channels into short blog posts to involve readers in events that matter to them.

By having a live blog strategy in our current on-the-go environment, organizations can use a smart variety of tools and sources to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.

Watching isn’t everything users do, though, and that is the cherry on top. Live blog followers can actually feed the stream with their comments and reactions. They can interact with other people, including those who are airing the event – journalists, reporters, expert commentators, or public figures that shed light on their topics of interest.

This makes a live blog experience highly personalized and interactive, and very different from television linear-watching or outdated written posts.

In a nutshell, live blogging is to broadcast real-time occurrences through short, simple, more frequent, and efficient posts, whatever the channel they’re in.

Sneak a peek at how companies have been using live blogs through the ages.

In order to broadcast conferences, technology companies started live blogging in the 2000s. Since then, it has become a popular and essential way for journalistic platforms to provide information on digital channels chronologically, keeping people updated. The Guardian itself has said that live blogging has transformed journalism.

Nowadays, companies from different cores and departments are using live blog to engross their content strategies. From sporting events to elections, from protests to music festivals, live blogging is already a reality when it comes to event coverage.

Why Live Blog?

As much as people currently spend more time engaging with highlights on social media, their thirst isn’t easily quenched by scrolling feeds on Instagram and reading breaking news on Twitter. Social media and traditional blogging aren’t enough to genuinely engage audiences anymore. 

Instead of simply reading the news and watching videos to absorb information, people want to live experiences and be part of them, even if they are sitting in their living room or working at the office.

In this context, a live blog strategy helps organizations to reach wider audiences and build authority towards topics they are interested in. It matches what customers are looking for: simplicity and easy access, all in a single place.

Consider this: you’re covering an important event and are about to live blog an exclusive interview with a popular figure in your niche. As soon as you broadcast, your readers will watch it in real time, send their questions, and discuss the interview with each other.

As you post a great news-driven package with videos, texts, and more regarding the occurrence, not only you’re giving your readers a glimpse; most importantly, you’re giving them the chance to live the experience with you.

By allowing your audience access to discuss and witness all the real-time content you’re providing, you drive conversation and traffic to your website and create a sense of community for people who are watching. If they have a good experience keeping track of a live event on your blog, they will see it as the go-to place to get useful content. Eventually, they will come back to check what’s new.

Besides helping you to establish authority as a reliable source of information, a live blog strategy boosts your audience. And, as you already know, an engaged audience is more likely to stay on your website longer.

Academic researches show that people all around the globe are growing supportive of live blogging. Plus, they make it clear that live blogs are here to stay. A survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in 2013, found out that readers like live blogs better than static content they can’t interact with – not to mention survey takers also believe real-time live coverage to be more reasonable and neutral than written posts. 

The Internet has made it easy for any company to broadcast important moments and stories to update and engage customers. That being said, live blogging is a huge opportunity for big, medium, and small-sized companies to give their audiences original and meaningful content while attracting and engrossing the public.

A live blog also has the potential to empower your company’s editors and optimize editorial work. Two people may live blog simultaneously, communicating with each other and taking online interaction to a new level.

With so much information being published every second, every day, your editors better have a concise publishing tool to bring data together and widen discussions, letting users engage with their posts.

There is so much untapped potential that can be taken advantage of by a live blog strategy, especially in the pandemic context we are witnessing. It represents an evolution in digital communication strategies and its power is evident, from politics and business to fashion and music.

Now that you know the importance of live blogging, let’s get a little more in-depth on how to use it for your content strategy.

Using Live Blog for your content strategy

When done right and smoothly, live blogging can engage your community as few things can. Live blogs have an amazing power to connect, share, analyze, educate and advertise. It is the perfect opportunity to answer to five essential questions towards any occurrence: who, what, where, when, and why.

So as to use Live Blog correctly in your digital content strategy, you need to pay attention to some details in the first place.

A live blog strategy demands a huge amount of focus while the event takes place. Still, you should be prepared way before the event starts. In the first place, choosing the right events to live blog is essential. The experience needs to be valuable to your customers, otherwise, you will be wasting money and time.

Secondly, a bunch of matters should be taken into account after you’ve chosen the ideal event. How is the internet connection and infrastructure where your editor is planning to broadcast? In those minutes where little is happening at the event, what material will you show your audience? How will you keep the attention of your public and increase their engagement after the streaming?

Keep in mind that you need to have a content strategy for what you’re communicating before, during, and after the event.

Last, but not least, it is equally determining to find a platform that fits your company’s needs and is easy for your customers to use. Live Blog platforms should be secure and able to go off without a hitch, aligned with high-level customer experience.

It also should be versatile and ready to run on multiple operating systems, working just as well on both mobile and desktop devices, and offer personalized setups.

You can add live chats so your readers will engage in quick-paced conversations and spend more time on your website. You can create polls to know that their opinions are. You can cover breaking events as much as events that are unfolding during a longer period of time. The possibilities are endless.

It all depends on how your company communicates with your audience and what concerns will be addressed by the real-time content you will stream. A live blog strategy can be a powerful engaging tool during official announcements, when related news break, in Q&As, and even in product launches – Apple being the biggest example on how to use live blogs for launch talks.

Once you decide to live blog, you will notice that it is easier to depend less on social networks. However, it is also possible to take advantage of social media integration by using automate live blog solutions to compile news from a wide variety of sources.

Let’s not forget that live blog strategies can work only so far without motivated human resources behind them. Technology is essential, but customer experiences are deeply affected by people interacting with readers and users. And that is where live blog makes your strategy flourish: by putting the right editors behind the screen to create fantastic customer experiences.

Take a look at how Arena’s clients are empowering their content and engagement strategy by live blogging.

A press conference to fight for: Fox Sports

Ahead of its blockbuster in 2018, UFC live-blogged a heated press conference led by fighters Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov. Seen as the most talented mixed martial artists in the world, both UFC icons were watched by over 500,000 people on Youtube. Meanwhile, Fox Sports live-blogged the conference, widening discussion both in their timeline and live chat. It successfully gave readers an exclusive place to comment about the fiery discussions that followed.

Jambase: music any time, anywhere

When it comes to live blog strategy, Jambase promotes live events to connect music fans everywhere with the music they love. One of those is “Dinner And a Movie”, a weekly event that live streams Phish’s concerts. The livestream gives fans a chance to watch previous Phish shows while discussing in the live chat. A plus is that Phish’s Replay, as the event is called, promotes recipes that readers can cook before watching the shows – an action that brings them together.

Greenpeace: As it happened: #BarclaysShutdown

Tired of watching Barclays pour billions into fossil fuels, Greenpeace activists enrolled in shutting down more than 100 Barclays branches across the United Kingdom in 2020.

The event was soon promoted on Greenpeace’s website. #BarclaysShutdown was live-blogged chronologically. Tweets, videos, and links that redirected people to email Barclay’s CEO were brought together as a way to deliver fresh news regarding the shutdowns and create awareness. 

Liveblogging the protests also shed a light on the challenges Greenpeace faces when it comes to climate-wrecking industries and generated a sense of community between activists – even those that couldn’t physically join.

Learn from those who are engaging audiences through their live blog strategy

To sum it up, live blogging helps you reach wider audiences and attract public attention while providing authentic and exclusive content. As a result, it increases customer engagement and revenue.

Arena’s live blog solution is highly customizable and allows the addition of social features to enrich the interactions between you and your audience. Our platform works on any website, from desktop to mobile, supports live chat rooms, and is ready to manage multiple people covering the same event at once. It also contains a mobile app that makes possible a post-on-the-go strategy, so your editors won’t miss a thing while broadcasting.

We work day after day to empower editors from more than 120 countries to cover any breaking news or live event in real-time, breaking their dependence on social networks.

So, if you want to use content to truly engage your audience, it is time for you to join us and find out the best professional and user-generated content using our advanced content discovery platform.

Claim your free trial now and start live blogging right away!