Bringing together a large group of people online who share common interests is critical to starting a community. However, achieving true community success in the long term requires more. Specifically, online community managers and community moderation tools play an essential role.
What Is Online Community Moderation?
Online communities are like gardens. They thrive when well taken care of, including removing weeds and receiving the key ingredients to grow, like sunlight, water, and nutrients.
Online community moderation is the art and science of guiding a community to align with specific values. Many communities have a list of formal rules. For example, Reddit community rules often discourage self-promotion. Other online communities – particularly those aimed at younger people – have rules discouraging inappropriate language (e.g., profanity).
There are two broad categories of online community moderation: software and manual. Software-based moderation (included in Arena Live Chat) is an excellent way to filter profanity and other objectionable words. Manual moderation has a role to play in other scenarios. For instance, you might be hosting a celebrity for a Q&A event and want to keep questions on-topic — both manual and software moderation can help you run a successful event.
Ways To Streamline Community Moderation
You can use a few strategies to make online community moderation easier.
Community Rules
Posting a community code of conduct or rules is an effective way to set expectations when new people join. If you host live community online events, it is wise to repeat rules that apply to those interactions so that everybody is on the same page. For example, the r/science community – which has 31 million members – on Reddit enforces multiple rules, including:
Must be peer-reviewed research
No abusive or offensive comments
Non-professional personal anecdotes will be removed
No medical advice
Comments dismissing established findings and fields of science must provide evidence
Manage Access To The Community
As communities grow larger, it becomes more difficult to maintain standards. Therefore, you should curate your community deliberately. For instance, a publisher can offer several online communities. One community – open to all registered users – may have limited moderation. In contrast, the same publisher might also have a second online community limited to paying subscribers.
For example, a publisher that offers “subscriber only” content and community limits access to people with an active subscription. By the way, a single organization can host multiple communities, including an open community where anybody can join and a more exclusive community for paying members.
Recruit and Retain Volunteer Moderators
Scaling up to a larger community with tens of thousands or more members is tough if you have a single moderator. Fortunately, you can recruit volunteer moderators (often called “mods”) to help maintain community standards. Usually, extending an invitation to a community moderator is best based on the person’s track record. For example, a person who encourages positive dialogue and gently reminds others of the community rules might be a good candidate for a volunteer moderator.
To retain your community moderators, offer them exclusive benefits. For example, content moderators might be invited to ask the first question when you have question-and-answer events. Publishers can also reward moderators with gifts like apparel or subscription discounts.
Build Safe Online Communities with Arena
Although social media can be a good place to start, bringing your online communities can bring numerous advantages for your brand. You can engage with your customers through Live Chat, Live Blog, and other Customer Engagement ideas. Arena is easy to integrate, perfect for conversations, community chat, as well as ratings and reviews.
Arena Community represents a significant leap forward in audience engagement and interaction. With its comprehensive feature set and user-centric design, Arena Community counts with moderation features that guarantee your virtual community stays safe and enjoyable for your audience.
Audience retention is one of the most important signs of a healthy digital publisher (or almost any other business that depends on its website for growth). When retention is high, there’s less stress to replenish your audience constantly. In other words, your audience-building efforts start to compound like money in a savings account!
Declining or low retention of users on a website is an early warning indicator that your business is in serious trouble. To find out the state of your retention, open Google Analytics (or your preferred analytics solution) and dig into the data.
Defining Audience Retention Success: 4 Measures
Like many other success factors, determining audience retention success is best viewed through multiple metrics over time. Start with these four metrics.
1. Audience Composition: Returning vs New
Look at your website analytics for the past month (or better, the last 90 days) and see how your audience breaks down between new vs returning users. You always want a combination of both types of users. However, the critical measurement is the percentage of returning users over time. If returning users are falling as a share of your total audience, it means your audience is losing interest.
This data point can only be understood if you consider your broader strategy and the other measures below. For example, building your sports audience may take some time if you recently changed your strategy to emphasize sports coverage over politics. Your returning audience share will fall during that phase, and your new visitors will increase.
2. Audience Retention By Segment
Viewing your online audience as a single aggregate has its limitations. That’s why we recommend applying segmentation. For example, Google Analytics lets you track “Audience by Cohort” on a time basis. For example, you can compare the behavior of people who first discovered your website in January vs those who discovered your website in July.
Analyzing audience cohorts by start date is helpful because it can tell you which marketing strategies work best. In one month, you might offer a series of live chat experiences with special guests and pull in a large audience of new visitors. Cohort analysis makes it possible to track the subsequent behavior of those new people. You might find that this live chat-related audience is most interested in live events on your website, so you’ll need to keep offering those experiences to keep them engaged.
3. Engagement
Engagement measures like – time on page, bounce rate, and number of pages viewed per user – also contribute to retention. Keeping a close eye on these engagement metrics matters because they signal a good match between your content and audience interests. Let’s consider each of these engagement metrics in greater detail.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who immediately leave your website after arriving. Generally, a high bounce rate is a cause for concern. For example, you might have used aggressive search engine optimization techniques to get a specific page ranking high in Google. However, if that page fails to satisfy users and many leave in seconds – you have a high bounce rate. In that case, search engines will likely view that page negatively, and your traffic will likely suffer.
Time on Page
Attention lies at the heart of online success whether you are a digital news publisher looking to generate leads for a business or make sales. If time on the page is very short (i.e., under 30-60 seconds), that is an early warning sign that your website needs to make a better first impression.
Improving time-on-page performance requires both technical and editorial improvements. From a technical point of view, use tools like PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your website. Using a content delivery network (CDN) may help improve speed. Evaluating the speed of applications and services running on your website is vital. Arena Live Chat, for example, is designed to be a lightweight application that runs fast. Editorial improvements may include writing more SEO-friendly headlines and making your content more accessible to scan.
Number of Pages Viewed Per User
Users who view multiple pages are highly likely to be engaged. Since these users are seeing more of your content, there is a higher chance that they will convert to paying subscribers, join your email list, or convert in another valuable way.
Arena Live Blog is a powerful way to lift your page views per user because of the way it presents content. In publishing, a live blog often provides breaking news updates on a new story. For example, post updates at the end of each inning of a baseball game. Once someone reads your updates for the first or second inning, they’ll likely keep returning to your website as the game progresses.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Increased customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the ultimate measures of successful retention. Unlike the other measures reviewed above, CLV is a lagging indicator. That means your efforts to improve retention may take weeks or months to translate into higher customer lifetime value.
Your customer lifetime value will likely hold steady or improve if built on a solid engagement foundation. That said, drawing a straight line between a specific page and a purchase can be difficult. After all, many people may not be ready to buy a subscription after they land on your website. It may take multiple visits over weeks before a person fully appreciates your brand and decides to buy.
If Your Online Retention Is In Trouble, Try This
Improving user retention – which ultimately contributed to higher customer lifetime value – takes several strategies. Put the following options into action, and you’ll quickly turn around your retention numbers.
Find Out What’s Working And Do More Of It
There’s almost always something that is working well on a website. Start by looking at your top pages – those URLs that have received the highest number of pageviews and highest average time on site. Identify the patterns in those pages and do more of what’s working!
Interview Your Super Fans
Staring at analytics data will give you some helpful clues, but there’s a danger with relying too much on numbers. You may lose focus on the fact that your online efforts are ultimately aimed at connecting with people! On the other hand, life is short, so it’s not practical to reach out and talk to everyone.
The compromise solution is to contact your super fans. It’s easy to find these fans. Check your social media and email marketing service to find people who have engaged the most with your content over the past month or two. Set up a call with 5 of these super fans. Ask them what they like most about your website (get specifics!) and what they would change.
Offer New Interactive Experiences To Your Audience.
Presenting content in a novel way is an underrated way to lift audience engagement. For example, create an online event where you discuss current affairs with a few panelists. This could include offering in-depth coverage of a war or election with experts. Arena Live Chat makes it easy to create a live chat experience on your website quickly.
Chatbot adoption has rapidly increased over the past decade as businesses seek to improve efficiency and service.
The first generation of chatbots used simple scripts and automation to provide preprogrammed answers to common questions. That innovation added value and eased burdens on support teams.
The next evolution of chat technology and AI will be completely different. Generative AI allows chat to engage audiences, suggest products, and more. While we’re excited about generative AI, it’s smart to consider the pros and cons of AI chat so that you can choose the right path forward for your business.
What Are The Pros and Cons of Chatbots?
Chatbots have exploded in popularity since their widespread adoption started a few years ago. Business Insider states, “consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion—up from just $2.8 billion in 2019.”
Traditional Chatbot Pros
The billions of spending from chatbot interactions are driven by two primary advantages:
Availability
Chatbots can run 24/7 on your website so that consumers can get answers whenever convenient.
Speed
Chatbots can respond quickly to questions by using decision trees and scripts. This approach means customers don’t have to wait on hold in lengthy phone queues.
Traditional Chatbot Cons
While chatbots have a lot to offer, this technology has some things that could be improved.
Complex Troubleshooting
If a customer has a novel or rare problem, it’s unlikely that a chatbot will be able to help them. In these situations, chatbots are usually programmed to refer a user to chat together with a human agent.
Empathy
Chatbots are usually unable to express meaningful empathy or engage an angry customer. For example, a customer might be upset about a delayed delivery. A shipping delay may be outside of the company’s hands. Meaningfully engaging an angry or disappointed customer will likely be beyond a chatbot’s capabilities. In other words, a chatbot is likely unable to “read between the lines” when faced with a significant customer concern.
Contributing To Revenue
The majority of chatbots are focused on customer service. Delivering excellent customer service can increase loyalty and support long-term revenue. Directly selling a new product is beyond the scope of many chatbots.
Advantages of Generative AI Chatbots
Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence designed to generate human-like responses.
Unlike traditional chatbots that rely on preset responses, generative AI learns from customer queries, data analysis, and natural language processing to create contextual responses that are more relevant and accurate. Integrating generative AI with chatbots can improve the quality of interactions, reduce response time, and increase customer satisfaction.
Generative AI Chatbot Pros
Personalized Responses
With the help of machine learning algorithms, chatbots can analyze customer data, such as their previous purchases, search history, and preferences, to provide tailored recommendations and support.
Brand Based Responses
The best generative AI technology is based on quality data. For example, you might train an AI system only on your company’s website. This training approach means an AI chatbot is more likely to provide on-brand responses to customer questions rather than generic ones.
Generative AI Chatbot Cons
Training and Testing
Generative AI technology is relatively new. As a result, it takes relatively more experimentation and effort to make this technology work compared to traditional chatbots.
Chatbot Misuse and Bias
Human misuse and abuse of chatbots is a known problem. For example, the Microsoft chatbot Tay was “trained” to express highly problematic comments, which upset many people. In addition, bias is a problem for chatbots. Consider Amazon’s HR machine learning technology which systematically undervalued female applicants because the system was trained on a data set of overwhelmingly male employees.
The tremendous power of generative AI means these problems will be overcome. As this technology matures, offering live chat experiences for your users is smart.
The Hybrid Approach To Chat And AI
Today, the best way to use AI is to integrate it with other chat experiences. For example, use live chat support staffed by employees when you have a major live shopping or live streaming event.
In those circumstances, unexpected problems or questions may happen, so having an employee available to respond makes sense. Chatbots can pick up the slack and support customers outside regular business hours and events.
Arena AI Concierge for Publishers, Content & Affiliate Commerce is here. Request early access.
Two Ways To Increase Customer Engagement With Live Chat & AI Chat
Now let’s focus on how using a live chat platform can boost engagement and improve the quality of your chatbot interactions.
1. Drive Higher Engagement With Live Chat
Whether you seek to grow an audience, make sales, or drive lead generation, all those goals rest on engagement. If people leave your website seconds after arriving, it won’t be easy to connect with them in any way. Live chat, especially with live events, gives customers an excellent reason to stay on your website.
There are two ways you can drive engagement and keep users on your website longer with live chat. First, allow customers to interact with their friends in a live chat room. For example, you might run a virtual event for sports fans where people can ask questions of their favorite athletes. That’s not all. You can also run occasional special invitation-only events for your customers featuring exclusive guests.
Arena Live Chat makes these live events more engaging, so customers will happily stay on your website longer. That means you will have more opportunities to use conversion cards to encourage purchases and other conversions. The opportunity to interact with like-minded people through live chat is something special that chatbots can’t offer.
Are you running a live virtual event for the first time? Use the virtual events checklist to prepare and run your event.
2. Use Live Chat Data To Improve Chat Bots
Your chatbots are only as good as the data used to power them. When you first set up a chatbot, it makes sense to start with basic questions and answers like the following:
What is the status of my order?
How do I request a refund?
How do I register for events?
What are the company’s hours of service?
How do I contact sales?
These initial basic questions will help you to get started with your chatbots. Over time, your customers may ask other questions specific to your company or changing situations. In 2021, many companies have been negatively impacted by supply chain delays and problems. By default, a chatbot will not be able to address these questions. However, your employees may notice more customers asking about supply chain problems. In that case, take that live chat feedback and use it to improve your chatbot.
Review the following steps every month to ensure your chatbots keep improving over time.
Review live chat transcripts
Review transcripts of live chat sessions on your website to see what kinds of questions customers ask. If you have many chat sessions, use the following tip below as an alternative.
Survey live chat staff for their views
Reviewing hundreds or thousands of live chat sessions to improve your chatbots may be challenging for your organization. In that case, reach out to your employees via a survey and ask them about the most common questions they encounter.
Test new additions to your chatbot
Develop updates for your chatbot based on the new questions and answers you encounter through live chat sessions. For instance, you might add tech support questions and answers if your company offers live-stream video sessions.
Over time, you can make your chatbots more capable of addressing common questions. Your employees will have more time and energy to solve new products, influencer promotions, and other creative solutions.
The Fastest Way To Add Chat To Your Website
Integrating generative AI with chatbots and live chat platforms provides businesses an efficient and cost-effective way to improve customer experiences. With personalized recommendations, robust security features, and automated responses, businesses can build loyal customer relationships, gain more leads, and increase revenue.
Adding a Gen AI chatbot to your website can take a lot of testing. You have to think of the most common questions, test the chatbot and then make improvements.
Is social media as we know it dead? The signs of trouble are certainly getting more and more common.
Since 2021, Twitter has seen an exodus of users, advertisers pulling back, and even the end of its famous bird logo.
Facebook’s strategic effort to diversify into the metaverse has failed. As a result, Facebook has reverted to launching Threads, a platform widely seen as a Twitter clone.
Even TikTok, Gen Z’s favorite social media platform, has faced challenges within the U.S.
Meanwhile, government bodies are getting increasingly aggressive in responding to online services, including social media platforms.
Each of these individual social media companies’ struggles prompts the question: is social media dead? Let’s explore the current scenario and understand the alternatives for the future of social media.
The Decline And Fall Of Social Media
Social media platforms have been declining for years, depending on who you ask and which platform you prefer. It’s difficult to generalize about the fate of social media because there are so many different networks to choose from. One estimate shows that there are over 100 active social media services today. Even more significantly, Forbes reports that there are 4.9 billion social media users globally (i.e., about 62% of the population) as of 2023.
One way to answer “will social media marketing die” is to look at the numbers.
Yet only a handful of platforms have achieved significant success with over 500 million users. As of 2023, only 12 platforms have over 500 million monthly active users. The list includes well-known platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as others like WeChat, Snapchat, and Qzone. These large platforms have achieved outsized success and influence in the social media industry.
AI: Threats And Opportunities To The Future of Social Media
The rise of generative AI tools, especially large language models like chatGPT, also poses questions for social media. Some commentators like Jonathan Haidt and Eric Schmidt see only a downside with articles like “AI is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic.” Such fears are one reason why governments are increasingly pursuing AI safety rules.
Generative AI, like social media itself, is in the eye of the beholder. It can also be used as a practical tool to increase engagement responsibly. Smart brands and agencies are already using it to lift efficiency. For more ideas on how to add AI to your workflow, see our post: 5 Use Cases for Generative AI in Publishing.
Twitter and Meta: The Decline of Giants
The social media platforms founded in the 2000s are encountering multiple challenges with growth.
To illustrate the challenge, we looked at a few recent developments at some of the largest social media companies.
Twitter: Struggling With Turmoil, Brand Changes, And Revenue Challenges
In 2021, Twitter earned 88% of its revenue from advertising. Following Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, chaotic layoffs, rebranding to X, and booming hate speech have advertisers heading for the doors. In November 2022, Omnicom Media Group recommended that its clients pause advertising spending on the platform due to brand safety concerns. Large companies, including General Motors and Volkswagen, are also pulling back from the platform.
The answer to “is social media marketing dead?” depends partly on how you’ve used your resources. If you’ve put all your resources into Twitter, you’re probably very worried about the future of your social media marketing efforts.
Pre-Tax Income Falls During The Pandemic
While the chaos following Elon Musk’s takeover has grabbed the headlines, the business’s fundamentals have suffered for years. The company reported a negative $50 million pretax income in 2020 and a negative pretax income of $411 million in 2021, and that’s before all the Elon Musk drama and the departure of nearly half of their advertisers.
We don’t know if Twitter will recover after suffering many blows, including losing thousands of employees. According to a December 2022 survey, Twitter is forecast to lose millions of users in 2023 and 2024. With declining users and concerned advertisers, Twitter’s future is uncertain. It’s time to find alternative platforms and channels to meet our online growth goals.
Bans and Restrictions
More recently, in August 2024, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered the suspension of X in the country after the platform missed a deadline to appoint a legal representative in Brazil.
The conflict originated in April when the court mandated the suspension of numerous accounts for spreading false information—an action that Musk criticized as censorship.
The ruling affects over 20,000 internet providers, requiring them to block the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to access X. Additionally, a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) is imposed on individuals and companies attempting to bypass the block using VPNs.
Meta’s User Growth Slows While Metaverse Spending Hurts The Bottom Line
With over one billion users, Facebook is still regarded as one of the most powerful social media platforms. However, The early years of dramatic growth in users and revenue are slowing due to a few developments.
Facebook’s growth, while still significant, is falling substantially. From 2020 to 2023, the platform grew monthly active users from 2.6 billion to 2.9 billion, according to Statista. Adding 300 million users over three years sounds impressive until you compare it to the platform’s past. From 2015 to 2017, the platform grew from 1.4 billion to 2.1 billion users (i.e., 700 million users).
Metaverse Spending Spiraling Out Of Control
The Information reports that Facebook has spent over $36 billion on the metaverse since 2019. That’s greater than the company’s entire operating expenses for 2019 – $33.9 billion! This level of spending is starting to approach “bet the company’s future” territory. So far, this initiative has delivered little to the company’s bottom line.
If this spending continues, Google’s experience may be instructive. Like Facebook, Google has historically earned most of its revenue from advertising. Over the years, Google has spent heavily on high-risk “moonshot” projects that lost over $800 million by 2016. It’s true that these investments might pay off at some point. All we know for certain is most of these efforts have made minimal contributions to the company’s performance.
Competition Driven Innovation
Aside from its metaverse initiatives, Facebook’s innovation in its core social media platforms is limited. Recent changes seem to be driven by a desire to compete with TikTok. As Bloomberg reported, Facebook assumes its users want a “TikTok clone.” Changes to the Facebook experience and Instagram have been attributed to the company’s desire to compete with TikTok.
Developing new features solely to compete with rivals has merit. Yet, it may also suggest a lack of creativity in the platform’s ideas. These efforts to copy features haven’t been a success with the platform’s users. The “Make Instagram Instagram Again” petition on Change.org has attracted over 335,000 signatures. The petition demands the return of chronological timelines, an algorithm that favors photos, and greater responsiveness to Instagram users. This type of negative feedback signals significant discontent.
The End of Organic Reach
Brands, organizations, and creators using Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram face declining organic reach, with only 5.2% of followers typically seeing unpaid content on Facebook. On Instagram, posts without paid boosts are similarly overshadowed by ads. Nearly 83% of marketers plan to increase social media ad spending, further diminishing organic visibility.
The pay-per-engagement model also overwhelms users with excessive ads. Recently, the European Commission accused Meta of violating EU laws by charging users for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram, forcing them to either pay or consent to data collection, in breach of the Digital Markets Act.
The Main Drivers Of Social Media Decline
While Facebook and Twitter’s problems have dominated the headlines recently, the problems in social media go beyond these companies. Several significant trends negatively impact large, established social media platforms. Increased competition and regulatory environment changes are fundamentally altering social media conditions.
Factor 1: Losing Competition For Attention
Without highly engaged users, social media companies cannot thrive. Unfortunately, older established social media companies need help to innovate. The most significant competition has come from TikTok in the past years.
Founded in 2016, the social media app has experienced dramatic growth through the pandemic years. At the end of 2019, the video-sharing platform had an estimated 500 million users. By late 2022, the Business of Apps estimated the platform has over 1.5 billion users. The platform is currently dominated by users under 30, who represent 63% of users.
Mastodon, a social platform based in Germany, has also experienced significant growth in 2022, mainly at the expense of Twitter. By March 2023, the platform had 10 million users (up from 2.5 million in November 2022). Established in 2016, Mastodon’s relatively decentralized format and lack of advertising features distinguish it from other social platforms.
Discord is another platform that’s successfully creating engaging digital communities. The text and audio interaction app has become popular in the gamer community. The Business of Apps estimates Discord had 13.5 million active servers in 2021, up from 4.4 million in 2018. While small, Discord is an interesting example of a platform growing with niche audiences.
The growing popularity of alternative social websites and apps suggests new possibilities for brands and publishers. Running a Discord server may help you to appeal to more Gen Z users. These competing community experiences also demonstrate an appetite for more curated content and experiences.
Learning the ins and outs of new digital platforms can be worthwhile. Yet, don’t overlook how resource-intensive it can be to start a new community in ideal conditions. The social strategies that work on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will not fully apply to Discord, TikTok, or Mastodon. However, your understanding of your audience’s interests and preferences is transferable, regardless of the platform you use.
Factor 2: Government Pressure Hurts Social Media’s Business Model
Government agencies and elected officials are scrutinizing social media apps more and more closely. Ten years ago, social media was typically viewed as a fun experience and a way to connect with friends and family. In recent years, governments have become seriously concerned about the ill effects of social media.
Government pressure and interest in social media platforms and other technologies has recently increased. In 2018, Facebook improperly shared the data of over 87 million users with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, leading to a major scandal that brought Mark Zuckerberg before the U.S. Congress. More recently, in July 2023, the U.S. government and several states filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of deliberately designing addictive platforms that prioritize profits while causing serious mental health issues.
Also in 2023, CNBC reported that Congress is investigating Threads, the new social media platform created by Meta, specifically looking at content moderation.
Concerns about the adverse effects of social media is an international phenomenon. The European Parliament published an in-depth analysis of the critical social media risks to democracy in 2021. As research continues, traditional social media companies may come under additional pressure. These concerns are not the only threat to traditional social media platforms.
The following regulatory changes have put pressure on the largest social media companies. In 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. While not targeted exclusively at social media, the regulations require greater protection of personal data, which is the stock in trade of social media. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has raised the bar further in the US. These new expectations impose costs for non-compliance as well. In 2022, the California Attorney General announced a $1.2 million settlement with a major retailer relating to the CCPA.
Most social media companies earn the lion’s share of their revenue from advertising. That advertising revenue largely depends on user data. As regulations tighten on privacy and consumer data, other companies are seeing opportunities. Apple’s increased emphasis on privacy measures may cost Facebook social media companies an estimated $10 billion in lost revenue.
Social Media Is Dead…What is the Future of Social Media?
The death or decline of a few of the largest social media companies is the most significant change to digital marketing in a decade. Many marketers have built their entire careers around social media expertise. As a result, it’s no surprise many marketers are anxiously asking is social media marketing dead?
The answer to that question depends on where you focus your efforts.
One option is building a presence on smaller or newer social media platforms like Discord, Mastodon, or Reddit. If there is a large potential audience for your brand on those sites, there is some value in building a presence there. However, moving from one social media platform to another has drawbacks. Fundamentally, brands do not set the rules on these platforms. It can be challenging to ensure brand safety in an environment where you have limited control, and minimal first-party data.
The Future Of Social Media Isn’t What You Would Expect
In today’s ever-changing digital landscape, depending solely on social media for audience engagement carries major risks. From algorithm changes to unexpected bans, brands are at the mercy of these platforms’ unpredictability. Building your own community platform gives you complete control, allowing for deeper, more sustainable audience connections.
Allow your audience to interact with you and meet people who have the same interests and values, while increasing retention and website monetization. With Arena Community, you can launch your online community inside your website in a few minutes, with several features that increase engagement, like group chat, live blog, polls, Q&As and much more. Learn more about Arena Community and how you can revolutionize audience engagement.
Online chat and chat rooms have come a long way in recent decades. In this quick guide to the history of online chat, you’ll find out where online chat started and how that history informed Arena Live Chat, AI and today’s chat experiences.
The Origins of Online Chat, 1970-1990
The first email was sent in 1971, and chat followed soon after. It was limited to universities, researchers, and governments. We see the first online chat emerge.
1973: Talkomatic for PLATO system
Developed at the University of Illinois in 1960, this early computer network included chat rooms, email, screen sharing, and other networked features. The key development form PLATO was the launch of Talkomatic in 1973. Talkomatic supported multi-user chat interactions. The technology was limited compared to today’s tools – the application had a maximum of six rooms and a limit of five participants per chat room.
1978: Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Bulletin board systems (BBS) can be seen as social media before the Internet. The first BBS was invented in 1978 in Chicago. BBS users mainly used dial-up modems to connect to a BBS, post messages, and download files. By one estimate, there were thousands of active BBS systems active in the 1980s and 1990s before the Internet, as we know it, took over in popularity.
1980: CompuServe CB Simulator
The 1980s saw a significant leap forward, with online chat becoming more widespread. Compuserve, a critical early Internet service provider, launched CB simulator in 1980. This online chat service made history as the first chat service available to the public.
1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
The launch of IRC pushed the adoption of online chat much further. Internet Relay Chat – along with email – is one of the few Internet communication apps from before 1990 that remain in use today. IRC made history when it was used to report Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. While IRC is still online, it has declined in popularity due to the launch of social media platforms.
The popularity of online chat exploded in the 1990s as more user-friendly technology, marketing, and innovation made the Internet available to millions of people.
Online Chat In The 1990s
In the 1990s, web browsers became popular, bringing millions of people online. However, many people still had slower connection speeds, so text chat was the perfect solution. Chat messages are easy to transmit, which allows near real-time conversations.
In the 1990s, chat rooms boomed, so it’s difficult to discuss them in depth. Instead, let’s look at some of the most influential services.
AOL Chat Rooms and AOL Messenger
In the 1990s, America Online (AOL) was a prominent Internet service provider. The company also became known for its popular chat rooms. The company offered unlimited access to its chat rooms to its subscribers. In 1998, the company made its instant messenger service – AIM – available to non-AOL subscribers.
MSN Messenger (1999-2014)
Released in 1999, MSN Messenger was another popular chat service. The chat app was widely perceived as a competitor to AOL’ AIM app. The app blended 1 on 1 messaging with some social networking functionality.
ICQ
Launched in 1996, ICQ quickly acquired millions of chat users. The chat service was notable because it was available on multiple operating systems – Windows, Apple, and Unix. Text messaging between individual users formed the core of the app. At its peak in 2001, the app had an estimated 100 million users.
Customer Service Chat, Chatbots, and Arena: Today’s Online Chat
As social media platforms grew in popularity in the 2000s, instant messaging apps lost some of their users. Despite that loss, chat and messaging remained popular features. One-on-one messaging (also known as private messaging) remained a key feature on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites.
Three trends emerged over the past decade that shaped online chat as we know it today.
Customer Service Chat
Online chat services started to move away from purely social and recreational uses with the rise of customer service chat. This chat service took off by promising greater speed than phone or email customer service. Chat service is also cheaper to provide – about 15-33% cheaper than phone support, according to one estimate. The cost savings is driven by the fact that it is possible for one rep to participate in multiple chat sessions in succession.
Streaming Chat Experiences
Chat and online experiences came together with streaming chat experiences in the 2010s. Across multiple platforms like Discord, Twitch, YouTube Live, and Facebook Live, users could come together and share their thoughts in text chat. These experiences often involved a shared video experience, such as watching a live stream.
With tools like Chat Analyzer, brands can see how their organization and products are being discussed by users in Twitch chats.
Chatbots
The success of delivering customer service through online chat prompted a question: could computers do more of the work? The rise of chatbots – a kind of automation that relied on scripts and simple automation – provided the answer. These automated chat experiences show that many repetitive questions (e.g., what’s the status of my order?) could be handled through automation.
Using scripts to handle routine questions, chatbots helped companies redirect customer service staff to address complex issues.
Arena Live Chat
The launch of Arena in 2017 took the history of chat in a new direction. Arena’s live chat brought the social experience of chat rooms back in a new way.
Brands and publishers can now engage their customers directly on their websites. Social media platforms increasingly struggle with disinformation and toxic content, so people are hungry for alternative ways to connect online. Arena also made live chat more accessible since it is a lightweight application that can run on almost any website.
What Is The Future of Online Chat?
Artificial intelligence and the need to connect with others beyond social media are two significant trends for the future. Large language models like chatGPT show that chat-style interactions with AI have exciting potential. In some ways, chatGPT brings together a search engine experience with chat.
AI chat experiences are powerful. These technologies are in their early days, so it’s difficult to know how they will used. For example, AI chat tools may be useful in facilitating brandsafe discussions and moderating conversations. AI chat may also play a role in growing online communities and easing the burden of community management.
Connecting with other people is the core of online chat. The first chat platforms succeeded because they offered group and 1-on-1 messaging. The social need to connect through chat isn’t going anywhere. Instead, we will see the growth of online chat experiences on many different websites. We look forward to sharing more insights exploring how AI and people can come together to offer exciting digital experiences.
Harnessing The Power of Chat For Your Website
The history of chat has seen many technologies come and go. What hasn’t changed is the desire to connect with other people. Brands seeking higher customer engagement are vital to give your audience a place to connect. Find out how to grow a digital community on your website with Arena.
Customer engagement is the new way to think about building trusting relationships with customers. It’s broader than related concepts like customer loyalty. Encouraging customer engagement makes your company more valuable for the long term.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is how your customers interact with your brand over time. A high level of engagement means customers are interested in new products, online events, and content that you release. Highly engaged customers likely spend significant time visiting your website and interacting with you online.
At its highest level, customer engagement means you have fans who eagerly introduce other people to your brand. This level of passionate engagement makes marketing more efficient because word-of-mouth efforts enhance your campaigns.
Customer engagement is also closely related to other ways of relating to your customers: customer experience and customer satisfaction. Let’s explore how these concepts connect further below.
Comparing Customer Engagement Vs. Customer Satisfaction
Customer engagement and customer satisfaction partly overlap. It’s unlikely that a brand can achieve high customer engagement levels if satisfaction falls. The scope is a crucial point of difference between engagement and satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction often focuses on rating a purchase experience or customer service interaction. For instance, a customer satisfaction survey may ask buyers if their concern was thoroughly addressed when they asked for help.
In contrast, customer engagement goes beyond purchases and interactions with company staff. Customer engagement also considers if a person is acting as a brand ambassador. In addition, customer engagement examines how a person interacts with your online content and experiences.
Customer Engagement Vs. Customer Experience
Customer experience and customer engagement are also related. Both can reinforce each other to increase revenue, reduce service expenses and lift a brand’s long-term prospects. Perspective and emphasis are key differences between these two concepts.
Customer engagement assumes that the customer is an active participant. Moment by moment, the customer decides how much time and money they want to spend with your brand.
Customer experience, in comparison, brings together the company’s departments and capabilities to design a consistent, integrated experience. For instance, robust customer experience ensures offline and online interactions are aligned in copy, offers, and strategy.
A robust customer experience journey makes it far more likely that customer engagement will stay high. The opposite is also true. A dysfunctional customer experience will likely cripple efforts to foster ongoing customer engagement.
3 Ways Customer Engagement Boosts The Bottom Line
Building and sustaining a customer engagement program takes effort and resources. So, it’s reasonable to ask what return you should expect. The return on investment from strong customer engagement takes a few different forms.
1.Improves Marketing Effectiveness
A highly engaged customer base makes it easier to boost the effectiveness of your marketing in a few ways. Engaged customers are more likely to refer other customers – a growth channel that is free for you. In addition, highly engaged customers are more likely to share a steady stream of data about themselves and their preferences. This stream of first-party data makes it far easier to create personalized marketing campaigns which are proven to deliver excellent results.
2. Improves Product Development
Changing or launching an existing product takes time and effort. Fortunately, customer engagement can reduce the risk of product development missteps.
For example, you can ask your best customers for feedback on features and prototypes before launching them in large campaigns. In addition, early customer feedback can yield reviews, feedback, and other forms of social proof, which make it far easier to launch something new to the market.
3. Reduces Customer Service Costs
Highly engaged customers are often willing to provide help to other customers. For example, take a look at the forums dedicated to software.
It’s common to see experienced users provide tips and advice to other users on social websites like Stack Overflow. One should not expect customers to take on all customer service responsibilities, but every bit helps to ease the burden of customer service.
Customer engagement has the potential to boost profitability. It’s important to know whether or not your program is trending in the right direction.
7 Signs Of Healthy Customer Engagement
How do you know if your customer engagement efforts are working? The best way is to build a strategy and develop custom measures associated with that strategy. As a starting point, the following indicators will tell you if your customer engagement program is on the right track.
1. Your Loyalty Program Is Thriving And Growing
High levels of participation in loyalty programs are an excellent sign of customer engagement. If customers take the extra step to register in your program, activate offers, and so forth, they are engaged with your offers.
However, relying too heavily on a customer loyalty program can be misleading. A brand offering unusually lucrative rewards may see a short-term increase in loyalty program engagement. To provide a more balanced view, look at some of the other signs below.
2. Your Online Events Pull In Excited Participants
Look at the attendance numbers and quality of engagement in your digital events and experiences. It’s a good sign if you have a cadre of loyal customers who consistently join your events month in and month out.
You might measure the number of people who take action during live events (e.g., the number of clicks on your conversion cards using Arena Live Chat).
3. You Receive Positive Reviews
Positive reviews written directly by customers indicate that your customers like your product. In addition, a steady stream of positive reviews is an even better sign of a highly engaged customer base.
4. Customers Submit Feature Requests, Ideas & More
When customers reach out to ask for changes, such as feature requests in software or different colors in apparel, that is an excellent sign. Your brand can also encourage this type of engagement by seeking feedback in surveys, live chat sessions, and other venues.
5. You Recover Effectively From Most Complaints
This signal of effective customer engagement is associated with customer service. Simply put, it’s challenging to eliminate all customer complaints. However, a company that effectively responds to complaints promptly is more likely to retain content customers.
6. You Have An Active And Growing Referral Program
While this measure of engagement has drawbacks, it is an excellent sign of engagement. If you see consistent referral volume, that is an excellent sign of engagement.
7. Customers Are Interacting With Your Online Content
This sign of customer engagement is essential for publishers. A paying subscriber who never visits your website, downloads a podcast, or views a video is at a heightened risk of disengaging and leaving your community.
For non-publishers, interacting with your online content is also essential to track. A high level of engagement tells you that your content program is on the right track. In addition, interactions with your content are an excellent opportunity to generate first-party data.
Customer Engagement In Practice: The Customer Engagement Lifecycle
Lasting customer engagement is a lifecycle process leading to continuous improvement. Every time you go through the process, you can deepen customer relationships and trust.
1. Gather Data From Your Customers
Data gathered directly from your customers, also known as first-party data, is the foundation of customer engagement. When designing programs and initiatives for your customers, measuring your efforts and collecting feedback are vital.
The way you gather data from your customers also matters. Email and website analytics can automate some of this to see which pages and content drive opens, clicks, and user attention. In other cases, using surveys and other direct approaches to solicit feedback is wise.
2. Analyze Your Customer Data
Arena Personas (Beta) makes it easier to get a clear picture of your customer engagement across multiple channels like email, website, and chat interactions. Gathering all of that data in one place is the starting point. Your next step is to analyze the customer data. Use the following questions to get started:
What customer engagement patterns are we seeing (e.g., the highest-value customers tend to attend webinars and other live experiences)?
Are there any gaps or quality issues in the customer data (for example, do you need data from your customer relationship management app)?
Does this data help us make better predictions about purchases, referrals, and other valuable actions?
3. Develop Customer Engagement Tests
Reviewing customer engagement data is interesting. However, the data on its own will not drive growth. It’s crucial to take some well-thought-out risks using customer engagement data.
The tests could be small in scope, like creating a test around marketing copy that succeeded with your website audience and rolling it out on display ads. Or it might be more involved, like adjusting incentives to encourage past customers to return and make more purchases.
4. Observe The Results And Iterate
Once you have a few marketing tests in mind, allow some time to pass to gather meaningful data. Unless you have an extensive customer base, thirty days are usually enough time to pass.
Once you have the new customer engagement data in, review your test. Ask yourself whether your assumptions are correct or need to be changed. Once you have gleaned whatever insights you can, iterate on the process and start the lifecycle process again.
Customer Engagement Strategies
There are several proven strategies that drive higher customer engagement. To boost (or launch) your customer engagement program, pick some strategies to delight your customers.
1. Launch (Or Enhance) Your Loyalty Program
A loyalty program is among the best ways to encourage ongoing customer engagement. Retailers, airlines, and other companies have proven the value of these programs for years. Yet, you don’t have to build a complex program to get started.
Your initial program could start by offering premium content or products to members first. Another approach is to offer a discount or another incentive to registered members.
2. Encourage The Right Behavior In Your Online Community
Customer engagement is ultimately built up through individuals interacting with your brand positively over time. When your online community starts, setting expectations with your audience is essential.
Executing this strategy will generally have two elements: positive and negative. The positive element is to look for highly engaged customers and praise their actions (e.g., like their comments, send thank you messages, and so forth). This praise will help to encourage your customers to keep up the excellent work.
The negative element is to have a set of ground rules and live up to them on your standard. For example, a brand may have a strict policy against hate speech, profanity, and other “not safe for work” content. If a community participant runs afoul of these rules, take appropriate action, such as sending them a private message to stop the behavior or potentially banning the person from your community if the negative behavior continues.
3. Invite Engagement Through Online Experiences
Creating the right environment is another way to boost customer engagement. Your website can potentially be the center of your brand’s online community. With Arena Live Chat, you can run live events from your website efficiently.
Offering a live chat experience to your customers is one of the best ways to grow relationships at scale and, what’s more, this kind of experience tends to be very popular with Gen Z… You might already have a chat in place for customer service. While helpful in solving problems, one-on-one customer service chat interactions do little to grow your community.
Instead, looking for ways to boost your community through live events where like-minded people can come together is more powerful. For example, you might invite your customers to join an “Ask me anything” online event with your CEO to bring a more human touch to your brand.
The Easiest Way To Lift Customer Engagement On Your Website
Customer engagement is good for the bottom line, makes marketing easier, and gives your customers a social experience. To bring your customer engagement strategy to life, it’s crucial to have the right technology.
The age of treating every customer the same is coming to an end. Thanks to Amazon, Netflix, and other digital community platforms, customers expect a personalized experience that reflects their interests. Without that, customers will start to view your brand as out of touch.
The good news? New strategies and technologies are making it easier than ever to connect with your customers. Before jumping into the specifics, stepping back and clarifying customer engagement is essential.
What is Customer Engagement?
A brand with strong customer engagement is one where customers have a deep, ongoing relationship. Instead of passing website visitors who forget about your content, highly engaged and loyal customers are different. They look forward to coming back to your website repeatedly. Many of them will even become ambassadors by sharing your content and reports on their social media profiles.
In other words, customer engagement is like having a group of trusted friends who would miss you if you were gone. Customer engagement helps brands develop customer loyalty, which will sustain your brand through disruption and downturns.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
Customer engagement strategies are critically important for several reasons. Let’s dive right into them.
Reason 1: Customers Value Experiences, Not Just Products
Recent research from Salesforce found that 80% of customers value the experience of interacting with a brand. Your customers might use your products differently, according to their own interests, expectations and preferences. That means that offering a personalized experience is essential.
If the customer experience is boring or disappointing, achieving significant growth will likely be very difficult.
Reason 2: Governments Are Changing The Rules
Many people around the world are upset about how their personal information has been handled by digital companies. As a result, governments have imposed significant controls, fines, and laws that penalize companies that fail to protect companies. For instance, California and the European Union have imposed significant consumer rights and company obligations relating to personal data.
When your company focuses on customer engagement, the entire process tends to be transparent. Your customers will see that you’re gathering information from them and using it to provide a rich experience. In contrast, other strategies, such as relying on third-party cookies, are perceived as being less transparent.
Reason 3: The Decline and Fall of Third-Party Cookies
Engaging customers is all about developing a direct relationship with your audience. It’s a significant change from marketers’ strategies for over a decade: third-party cookies.
For years, marketers have relied on this data to track customer activity across the Internet quietly. While powerful for brands, this type of individual behavioral tracking has prompted significant privacy concerns. As a result, Apple has removed support for cookies from their browser. By 2024, Google Chrome – the world’s most popular browser – will also remove support for third-party cookies.
The end of third-party cookies means that your brand has to find other ways to achieve growth, like customer engagement,
Reason 4: ROI Personalized Experience
We saved the best for last: customer engagement and retention strategies deliver far greater ROI. How? Personalization can lift ROI on marketing significantly – McKinsey found it can drive a 10% increase in sales. First-party data, provided directly by the customer or audience member, is one of the most reliable ways to gather accurate data to fuel personalization.
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Want to explore first-party data further and use it to increase revenue? Our explainer post has you covered: What Is First-Party Data?
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Fortunately, there are some barriers to entry to delivering these kinds of experiences. That’s good news for you. Investing in customer engagement now gives you an edge over the competition.
Your marketing, content, and offers will be seen as much more relevant. That means more clicks, shares, and revenue without relying on third parties like social media platforms.
Customer engagement is robust and has a lot to offer. Yet, these benefits might seem a bit abstract. That’s why we’re breaking down the concept and looking at it in three primary use cases: publishing, marketing, and sales.
Effective Customer Engagement Strategies
Customer Engagement for Publishers
Most publishers earn most of their revenue from advertising and paid subscriptions. To achieve both goals, converting anonymous website visitors into registered users is vital.
There are several ways to apply customer engagement to your publishing business. For simplicity, assume you are focusing on boosting engagement with paid subscribers because you want to lift recurring revenue. The following strategies can help you to lift engagement.
Offer Small Group Experiences
Loneliness had already become a major social problem before the pandemic arrived – today, 1 in 3 Americans are lonely, according to Harvard. Publishers can lift engagement and offer chances to connect through small group experiences.
The concept is simple: invite subscribers to a “fireside chat” style event and limit attendance to 20-30 people. Running a smaller group experience makes it far easier to focus your content and allows your audience to meet like-minded people.
Offer Multiple Incentives For User Data
Maintaining high customer engagement means staying relevant to your audience even as their needs change. That means the standard approach of gathering audience preference and interest data at registration isn’t enough.
The solution is to give your audience more incentives to share data with you regularly. For instance, you might offer to extend your paid subscriber’s subscription by three months if they agree to participate in 3 short online surveys over 90 days. Beyond free access, some in your audience might be interested in sharing their insights with you if there is a prospect of being quoted or included in your coverage. Experiment with multiple incentives to see what connects best with your audience.
If you’re not in the publishing business, don’t worry. We’ve got your needs covered in the following two sections.
Customer Engagement for Marketing
Some, perhaps most, of your website visitors will not be ready to buy the first time they land on your website. Your website will likely be forgotten if you fail to offer an appealing experience. Here are some ways you can make your website more engaging for customers.
Use engagement technology on your website
Social experiences for your audience – like asking questions and reacting to others’ comments – can happen right on your website. There’s no need to rely on social media platforms as your only way of building an online community.
Installing Arena Live Chat on your website is a great way to make your website more engaging. You can install the software and launch a chat session in just a few minutes. The best part? You keep the audience’s attention focused on your website, which means more chances to earn conversions.
Create real-time experiences for your audience on your website
Live experiences like live shopping, live streaming, and even watching other people play games on Twitch are powerful ways to drive attention. There are multiple ways to draw significant attention. You can publish long-form content, including articles, videos, and podcasts. Engaging content is often the spark that draws the audience’s attention to your website.
You can also deliver interactive experiences for your audience. These experiences give people a reason to return to your website repeatedly. For example, you can use Arena Live Blog to provide coverage of a major industry event like CES if you are in the electronics field.
Customer Engagement for Sales
Customer engagement for sales is critical for any business focusing on long-term customer relationships. Use these strategies to keep your buyers coming back for more and more.
Enrich your loyalty program
Points, discounts, and other traditional incentives are all proven ways to keep customers buying. Unfortunately, standing out in the loyalty space is getting more difficult.
The average American had 7.6 active loyalty membership memberships in 2022, according to Statista, while the average number of total memberships was 16.6. That means that nearly half of loyalty program members are inactive!
One solution is to offer memorable experiences for your loyal members, like online events. For instance, you might invite your “VIP customers” to have early access to products in development or place custom requests. Going the extra mile to give your best customers something special can help to lift engagement.
Invite customers to share their experiences
You’re probably already encouraging reviews, recording customer interviews, and publishing case studies. Another way to invite your customers into your growth efforts is to shine a spotlight on your customers in digital events. For example, invite a few of your top customers to a panel discussion and leverage Live Chat to encourage discussion.
Using Arena For Customer Engagement
Highly engaging content and a deep understanding of your audience are crucial to customer engagement. Empowering your team with the right tools to create digital experiences for customers is crucial. Arena Live Chat makes building a digital community on your website easy. Learn more about using Arena to grow an online community for customer engagement.
The customer engagement vs. audience engagement debate is growing. The reality is that most businesses need to grow their audience and customer base. The strategic choice is to decide how to cover types of engagement and allocate your resources appropriately.
What Is Audience Engagement?
From a marketing perspective, audience engagement refers to people who have interacted with your online presence in some depth. Think about an audience at a concert – you’re only part of the audience if you see most (if not all) of the performance. Likewise, your online audience excludes people who bounce or visit your website once and never return.
Audience engagement is the art and science of drawing website visitors to consume multiple pages or content assets. Ideally, audience engagement also has a social aspect. Again, think of attending a performance. You might go to an event with a friend and have the chance to meet other people who share similar interests.
Translating audience growth to revenue depends on your business. Publishers earn more from audience engagement right away because a more engaged audience views more ads. Other businesses are more likely to get more leads and conversions from a high audience engagement.
Engaging your customer base overlaps with audience engagement, but there are also some key differences.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is focused on building a deeper relationship with your customers. This might include using a loyalty program to encourage more purchases. In addition, customer engagement also includes gathering first-party data from your customers. For example, you may use data to better understand the content, pages, and online experiences that customers experience before making a purchase.
Since customer engagement focuses on people who have bought before, it is closer to revenue. After all, a customer has already taken the leap of trust to buy once. If they’ve had a good experience, inviting them to buy again is easier.
The challenge with customer engagement is balancing maximizing revenue and enriching the relationship. If your customers only hear from you during a sale, some may tune out. Alternatively, brands that show appreciation for customers through events, sharing content, and seeking feedback are more likely to build a trusting relationship.
Assessing Your Need For Audience Engagement And Customer Engagement
Most companies need audience engagement and customer engagement strategies to achieve their growth objectives. Audience engagement helps to replenish the top of the marketing funnel (and grow advertising revenue for publishers). Customer engagement gives you the tools to develop loyal customers for the long term.
To decide which mix of audience engagement vs. customer engagement to pursue, take a moment to assess your current situation with the following maturity self-assessment.
Audience Engagement Maturity
Reflect on these audience engagement questions to determine your strengths and weaknesses in audience engagement.
1) Do you have audience engagement growth metrics established?
2) Are you gathering more first-party data directly from your audience month over month?
3) Does your website offer community experiences like online events regularly?
4) Are you communicating with other stakeholders regularly to demonstrate the value of audience engagement?
5) Do you have audience engagement solutions like Arena Live Chat and Live Blog available?
If you answered yes to most of the questions, you have a highly engaged audience. In that case, shifting your focus to customer engagement is wise. On the other hand, if you answered no or weren’t sure about the questions, audience engagement should probably be your primary focus.
Customer Engagement Maturity
Assessing your customer engagement maturity starts with exploring the following questions with your team.
1) Do you have a customer loyalty program that rewards engagement and purchases in some way?
2) Do you know your customers better today than you did a year ago regarding data?
3) Do you regularly tell your customers that you appreciate their business?
4) Do you provide special experiences (e.g., early access, discounts, online experiences) just for your customers?
5) Do you have a customer data platform (i.e., CDP) in place to organize all of your first-party data?
The maturity level for customer engagement is similar to the audience engagement outlined above. If you answered yes to three or more of the questions, you have a high level of customer engagement maturity. If you were unsure of your answers or had two or fewer yes answers, your customer engagement maturity has significant room for improvement.
How To Use Online Experiences To Grow Engagement
We have some good news: Whether you see greater audience engagement or customer engagement opportunities. With some tweaks, you can use similar tools and strategies to lift both kinds of engagement. Let’s consider two scenarios: increasing audience engagement and lifting customer engagement using online events.
Boosting Audience Engagement Strategies
You must offer something new and attractive when your audience is not large or engaged enough. The harsh reality is that your audience members have many other online options for connection, learning, and entertainment. The following ideas can help you to lift engagement.
Partner With Influencers In An Online Event
Influencers are celebrities for a specific niche or interest. Since influencers spend their time growing their audience, they have the know-how to help you. Depending on the size of your audience and resources, you can offer different forms of payment to an influencer to run an event with you. Add Arena Live Chat to your event so your audience can easily ask questions and connect with other participants.
Leverage Breaking News
Breaking news events offer a potential shortcut to growing your audience quickly with Arena Live Blog. If you can be the first to offer coverage or offer something uniquely different than others, you can stand out. For example, consider Nate Silver’s election coverage. His approach to offering a data driven approach to election coverage and politics helped him to build an audience.
Lifting Customer Engagement Strategies
Growing customer engagement through online experiences is different in terms of focus. Instead of throwing the doors wide open, customer engagement works best when focused. Here are some examples to get you started.
Customer Appreciation Experiences
Many companies organize an annual customer conference. However, running a full-scale live event may not suit your goals or budget. Instead, an online event focused on customer appreciation can work even better. For example, a B2B company may have many ecommerce customers. Consider inviting a small group of ecommerce company owners to an exclusive “fireside chat” where they can network with each other and meet an engaging guest speaker.
Early Product Feedback Events
Another approach is to invite your customers into the product development process. When you have a prototype product ready, invite VIP customers to see it. Let your customers use the beta product for free. They’ll feel appreciated by giving them early access and acting on their feedback. You’ll receive helpful comments that can also help you launch the product.
Reach Your Engagement Goals With Arena
Whether you want a larger audience or more excited customers, investing in engagement can help. Use Arena Live Chat and Live Blog to offer interactive online experiences directly through your website. Build your community right on your website with Arena!
Economic worries and disruption in online advertising mean previously reliable strategies and playbooks aren’t delivering results. Navigating these trends will be challenging! Charting your path forward is much easier when you know the significant trends impacting online marketing and advertising.
Multiple companies are reporting falling spending on online advertising over the past few months. eMarketer recently cut its forecast for US digital ad spending by $5 billion, down to $278 billion. The pullback on spending is hitting Google, which reported falling advertising spending in several segments at the end of Q4 2022.
Cutting advertising spending is a common strategy whenever there’s economic uncertainty. It happened last in early 2020 when the pandemic rocked the world.
At the same time, the need to drive growth and get more customers isn’t going anywhere. To retain your advertising budgets and stretch them further, get proactive on efficiency and engagement.
Reassess Your Brand Vs. Direct Response Allocation
Brand-building advertising is powerful for growing a company in the long term. However, it can take a lot of work to show immediate results with that style of advertising. In the short term, consider shifting more resources toward direct marketing to harvest more results.
Tighten Up Funnels And Performance Attribution
Online advertising channels and strategies vary in how easy they are to measure. Now is the time to look at your campaigns and see which ones are bringing in results. Consider pausing campaigns with more steps and moving parts since these efforts are more challenging to track.
Trend 2: Focus On Anonymous User Conversion
Anonymous website visitors represent a significant opportunity for brands and publishers. They have discovered you. Much of the hard work of acquisition and awareness building is done. The next step is to get to know your audience better.
The way forward is to focus more on offering value to anonymous website visitors. Don’t overlook classic strategies like discounts, buy one get one, and the like. Such strategies have worked for decades for consumer brands.
For publishers and B2B companies, there may be better choices than discounts to convert anonymous users. Instead, look at ways to package premium experiences available only to registered users. Online events remain one of the most cost-effective ways to draw audiences in.
Trend 3: Launch More Online Events
It’s true that enjoying food and drinks with your customers in person offers a powerful way to build relationships. However, traditional events also require significant investment. Spending $20,000 or $100,000 on traditional events or conference participation might not go forward this year.
The alternative to high-cost traditional events is to run more online events. Since online events don’t require venue booking and other elements, they are often much faster to run. Offering your registered users exclusive access to your online events is one compelling way to convert more browsers into customers.
To make the most of your online events, ensure you give your audience a way to connect and share feedback. Arena Live Chat makes it easy for users to ask questions, share thoughts and meet others.
Trend 4: Multi-Disciplinary Marketers Will Win
The digital marketing world is complex. There are thousands of apps, many certifications, and skill sets to learn! Budget to hire additional staff, agencies and other support may get more challenging to access. Yet, marketing teams are still responsible for delivering growth within those constraints.
Developing multi-disciplinary marketers is the way to thrive through this uncertainty. This means identifying skills, strategies, and technical skills you lack today and working to develop them. One approach is to pair a traditional evergreen skillset like copywriting with a digital marketing skill like search engine optimization (SEO).
While growing new skills is valuable, keeping this growth focused on your goals is essential. For example, connect your drive to improve SEO skills with a tactical goal to get more conversions on your top 5 pages.
Trend 5: Growing Pressure To Deliver Efficiency In Marketing Departments
This trend is similar to the first trend – pressure on advertising budgets – but it has some nuances. The pressure on marketing teams to deliver better customer engagement results will take a few forms. Marketers may only be able to hire talent or retain some of the technology they had planned for.
It’s not just a question of marketing budgets facing greater scrutiny either. Sales and management teams may demand more support to deliver growth this quarter. The good news is that there are multiple tactics to deliver greater results in a short period.
Win Back Campaigns
Reengaging past customers is one of the best ways to grow on a budget. You probably have their details and permission to communicate with them. Make sure you use thoughtful targeting for the best results (more on this front in the next section).
Reassess Marketing Technology
Take a hard look at your current marketing technology stack, especially the older and more expensive apps. These assets may have delivered value once, but that may no longer be true if your strategies and target market have evolved.
Improve Internal Communication
Marketers usually focus their efforts on customers. As internal pressure increases, you must keep engaging your internal stakeholders. For example, aim to create a simple marketing dashboard that emphasizes the most significant wins of the month.
Don’t assume that other departments, like sales or executives, will automatically see the value of marketing. Taking a few hours a month to communicate marketing wins (e.g., “we increased order value by 10% compared to the previous month!”) is a vital way to maintain trust in marketing.
Trend 6: Targeted Engagement Campaigns Become Essential
You have registered users, email list subscribers, and others engaged with your brand. The old playbook of sending the same promotion to everybody is less likely to work today. Launch more targeted engagement campaigns using the first party you have from your users, like the pages they’ve visited and emails they open.
Here are a few ways to design more tightly focused engagement campaigns:
Focus On The Next Engagement Step
Instead of asking for the sale immediately, ask yourself this question: what’s the most common next step people make after registering on our website? The answer could be attending a software demo. Or you might find that users tend to consume several pieces of long-form content. The objective is to go small – look for the next logical micro step in engagement and focus your efforts there.
Ask For Feedback and Ideas
Coming up with new and engaging ideas to inspire your online audience gets tiring. Fortunately, you don’t have to be the one with all the great ideas. Instead, develop 2-3 high-level content ideas and send them to your audience. Ask your audience which idea sounds most promising!
For an in-depth exploration of leveraging customer questions and surveys in your marketing, see the book “Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Method to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy” by Ryan Levesque.
Invite High Potential Audience Members To An Event
Review your customer data platform to identify highly engaged prospects who have yet to buy. For example, create a segment of users engaged with your brand across two or three channels. In this case, smaller is better! Inviting 50-100 carefully selected people to an online event tightly connected to their interests.
Trend 7: Renewed Focus on Loyalty Marketing
As economic uncertainty hits marketers and their budgets, there’s a greater demand to emphasize proven strategies. Growth may be challenging, so keeping current customers will become even more critical. The following steps can help you design better loyalty and retention campaigns.
Examine Customer Churn Triggers
Find out the top three reasons why your customers are leaving so that you can create campaigns to address those issues. For example, customers on an annual plan may feel surprised by an unexpected charge. To reduce this cause of churn, identify customers who are 1-2 months away from renewal and offer them additional payment options.
Reinforce Your Loyalty Program
In 2023, Starbucks announced changes to its loyalty program that devalued loyalty program points. In the past, airlines have made similar changes. Such changes make it harder to retain loyal customers. Also, such changes generate negative publicity that makes engagement far more complex.
Find out if your organization plans changes like these and see if you can pause or defer implementation to lift retention.
First-party data is quickly becoming the new opportunity to fuel personalization, customer engagement and online growth. Publishers are already starting to use first-party data to deliver customized experiences to their audience. For retail and ecommerce brands, there’s a tremendous opportunity to grow with first-party data.
What Is First Party Data Anyway and Why It Matters
The best way to explain first party data is through a quick story. Imagine you’re running digital marketing at an apparel company and you’re looking for ways to sell more shoes this quarter. You have many different options and resources to choose from. One decision you’ll have to make upfront is what kind of data to leverage.
Consider planning your campaign by reviewing past customer activity. For example, you may look at website analytics to see which product pages are already receiving the most traffic. In addition, ask your customer service colleagues to summarize what kind of questions and complaints you get. All of this data comes directly from your customers, website visitors, and email subscribers. That’s all first party data.
First party data is often contrasted with another popular type of marketing data: third party data. For many years, digital marketers have used third party data for growth. Third party data is customer data generated by other companies. While this type of marketing data is popular, it’s becoming less useful for two reasons.
There are two reasons why companies are moving away from third party data. First, it is less transparent to consumers and can result in negative feedback. Second, Google and Apple are ending support for third party cookies (a popular technology that enables many third party marketing campaigns) in their browsers.
First party data has multiple applications regardless of how you sell products. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most powerful use cases.
Retail and Ecommerce Use Cases For First Party
At its simplest, first party data is data that you gather directly from your customers, website visitors and others who interact with your brand online. Leveraging first party data makes it easier to achieve several sales and marketing goals.
Achieving Marketing Goals With First-Party Data
Systematically using first party data makes it easier to achieve your digital marketing growth goals.
Optimize Your Content Marketing Efforts
First party data tells you what content, links and assets your audience finds the most engaging. For example, start your analysis by reviewing your top 10 pages by traffic for the past 90 days. Ideally, focus on the pages that have driven the most conversions (e.g. purchases, website signups etc).
Based on what you find, you can make better decisions about your content marketing strategy. An athletic apparel ecommerce company might find that their ultimate guide for marathon running drives the most conversions. Based on that insight, you may create more content to attract marathon runners to your website.
Reduce Digital Marketing Expenses
Success in digital marketing requires the patience to experiment with new ideas, technologies and campaigns. The downside is that many marketing tests may not deliver significant results. When marketing budgets come under pressure, you may be asked to stretch your marketing dollars further. First-party data can play a powerful role in lifting marketing efficiency in the following ways.
Optimize Referral Campaigns
Word-of-mouth referrals are one of the most powerful ways to grow online. That said, sending out a blast message to your entire database is unlikely to work.
It’s far better to focus referral campaigns on your VIP customers – the ones who buy over and over again. First party data can help you identify your best customers which means you can create a far more targeted referral campaign.
Boost Loyalty Marketing Efforts
Many retail companies have loyalty programs because these efforts effectively encourage repeat business. The data you gather from buyers through your loyalty program is one of the most valuable forms of first party data.
Analyze the buying patterns of your top customers and then use those patterns to inform your new campaigns. For example, you may find that 80% of repeat shoppers start by buying low-priced products. Use that insight and prepare a loyalty campaign to encourage one-off buyers to buy that product.
Increasing referrals and loyalty sales don’t require additional advertising so they’re a great choice when budgets are tight. You just need to focus on analyzing your customer data and executing campaigns based on those insights.
Achieving Sales Goals With First-Party Data
Some businesses are not focused on online sales. For example, industrial products, vehicles and enterprise software are rarely bought in a matter of clicks. In these more complex sales, first party data can support your sales goals.
Identify High Interest Sales Leads
Sales professionals only have so many hours in the day. First party data can play a role in lifting the efficiency of sales conversations. An analysis of first-party data can identify the prospects who are the most engaged with your content and may be open to a sales call.
Earn Attention With Relevant Content
Complex sales can take weeks, months or even years to close. Staying in touch with prospects during these longer customer journeys takes a lot of work! You can only send a “checking in” style email so many times.
First party data can support the nurturing process. You can see which content your customers access in the lead up to purchase and afterward. As a result, you can craft follow up messages focused specifically on content that resonates with buyers.
From First-Party Data To Deeper Engagement
Simply gathering and using first party data will give you an immediate advantage in making sales and reaching your marketing goals.
Ultimately, your goal isn’t really focused on getting data (even highly useful data like first party data). You want to build an audience of people who look forward to visiting your website regularly. An audience who finds insights, connections and experiences all through your company is one that will stay loyal.
The secret to gaining first party data and deep engagement requires the right technology. That’s where Arena Live Chat technology comes in. You can install it in just a few minutes and get up and running. Discover more about how Arena can help you grow ecommerce revenue!
