All You Need to Know About Content Moderation

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Arena

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

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

What is content moderation?

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

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

What is human moderation?

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

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

What is automated moderation?

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

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

How important is content moderation in enhancing customer experience?

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

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

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

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

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

Content Moderation in Building Relationships with Customers

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

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

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

Select the best content for your business

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

Choose the best content moderation to utilize for your content.

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

Always make your content personalized to your customers’ needs.

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

Moderate all your content consistently

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

Establish concise rules and regulations

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

Utilize all your resources

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

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

Quality over quality

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

Customer Interaction

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Are you ready to drive more revenue to your business?

Now, try the Arena for free!

Customer Engagement Tips to Improve Sales

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Natalia Gaal

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

What Is Customer Engagement?

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

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

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

Why Is Customer Engagement So Important?

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

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

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

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

How Can Customer Engagement Specifically Help Drive Sales Conversion?

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

It Will Keep Customers Informed

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

It Creates Brand Awareness

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

It Helps Identify What Customers Truly Want

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

It Opens Up the Possibility of Larger Orders

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

It Transforms Customers to Brand Advocates

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

What Role Can Live Chat Play In Customer Engagement?

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

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

Can Live Chat Really Help To Drive Sales Conversion?

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

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

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

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

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

Success Stories With Arena Live Chat

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

Endnote

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

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

Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Businesses

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Paola Magni

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

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

What is Customer Engagement?

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

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

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

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

Customer Engagement Strategies

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

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

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

2. Implement automation to increase productivity

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

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

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

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

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

4. Offer personalized service

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

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

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

5. Take feedback seriously

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

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

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

The Five Stages of Customer Engagement

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

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

1. Discover

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

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

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

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

2. Shop

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

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

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

3. Buy

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

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

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

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

4. Own

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

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

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

5. Advocate

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

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

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

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

31 Live Chat Black Friday statistics you must see

Posted on November 5, 2020 by Arena

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

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

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

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

How Live Chat can impact your business

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

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

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

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

We can prove it:

Live Chat statistics you need to know

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

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

Customer support and satisfaction

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

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

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

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

Lead generation & Conversion rates

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

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

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

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

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

Customer experience and engagement

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Revenue stats

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

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

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

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

Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support:

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

Response time

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

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

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

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

Live Chat vs. Chatbot

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

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

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

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

On the other hand:

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

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

The future of Live Chat

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

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

Further on, an interesting fact is that:

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

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

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

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

Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat

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

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

Customer Data Platform: where audience data and sales strategy meet

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Arena

Are you having trouble improving conversion rates and connecting customer insights from different touchpoints? A Customer Data Platform helps you understand your audience in a granular way and enables you to craft better campaigns and product offers.

Understanding customers always required brands to look at their audience through different lenses – whether through other marketing channels, relationship platforms, or customer segments. On the verge of Big Data culture, however, just having a fragmented view of your audience is not enough anymore.

What drives sales is the ability brands have to deliver a cohesive customer experience (CX) across different channels, which is only possible by fully understanding channel correlations and cause and effect connectors along the audience’s touchpoints.

These days, people interact with brands more often than ever before, and so making sense of different interactions is a lot more complicated than it once was.

Recent research by Ascend2 and Research Partners consulted more than a thousand marketers and found that 43% see data integration across different platforms as one of their main goals. In contrast, 37% wish to enrich data quality and completeness.

No wonder executives are investing more and more in their technology stacks: one-third of industry professionals believe it’s essential to have the right technologies for data collection and analysis, according to a study by Digital Doughnut. Currently, 44% of marketers say they already have data management platforms.

But amongst all data platforms available, the Customer Data Platform is undoubtedly the best you can have if your goal is to understand your audience better and drive more sales. We’ll show you why!

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What is CDP? And how does it work?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that unifies customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It combines customer’s demographic data, buying history, social media and content preferences, call centers, and customer navigation data.

Once implemented, the CDP acts as a 360º data solution: it collects, filters integrates, and analyzes customers’ data in real-time.

CDPs can ingest structured and unstructured data from Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM), Data Management Platform (DMPs), customer support channels, eCommerce websites and apps, payment systems, social media, etc. They also track behavior across different devices.

By acting as a hub for many data sources, the Customer Data Platform allows marketers to build a holistic view of single customers and their pain points.

But how exactly do they organize so much data? Well, CDPs rely mostly on first-party data so they can determine the so-called Unified Customer Profiles, which are profiles based on information from real customers and prospects.

That makes the data match consistent across different platforms, and hence the audience insights end up being much more reliable for marketers.

Check out some practical examples of data collected by customer data platforms:

Transactional data: order details, customer and product value, renewal dates, abandoned baskets, stage in the conversion funnel
Behavioral data from web and mobile: Products and categories browsed, clicks, store visits, interaction data, number of pages visited, etc
Profile data: Contact and opt-in data, psychographic data, details about channel and content preferences, lifestyle, etc
Brand Relationship Data: Email interactions with customer support, social listening insights, social media comments, etc

The end-to-end role of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

In today’s competitive landscape, marketing executives are expected to keep track of all customer interactions and connect marketing efforts to other departments, such as sales and customer success, to provide customers with a satisfactory customer experience (CX).

The rush for data management optimization is seen clearly by the CDP industry’s growth in recent years. According to the Customer Data Platform Institute, the number of CDPs available in the market doubled from 2017 to 2018. Now, there are more than 50 CDPs in the industry worldwide.

The truth is that CDP can be an asset for every department within a company, working as an end-to-end solution to enrich customer experience. We’ll soon explore how brands can use CDPs to drive sales, but first, let’s explore CDPs’ overall benefits for companies.

Breaking Data Silos

CDPs integrate data from multiple departments, which encourages different teams to collaborate and speeds operational routines. With a CDP, marketing, sales, customer experience, and support teams can be on the same page regarding customers’ needs.

Automating marketing workflow

Because they automate a lot of the data integration and analysis, CDPs make the lives of marketing professionals a lot easier, freeing them from repetitive work and allowing them to spend more time in strategic planning.

Speeding up decision-making

As data processing happens in real-time in the CDP, it also makes it possible for companies to easily spot changes in customer behavior and act upon them while quickly sharing relevant insights with different teams.

The power of CDPs in driving sales

As we pointed out, CDPs are an excellent liaison point for different departments and can be at the heart of customer experience management. But to what extent can CDPs contribute to final sales?

There are many ways CDPs can directly or indirectly improve conversion rates, drive customer loyalty, and decrease churn and bounce rates. In fact, a report from Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of organization leaders believe the Customer Data Platform is helping them drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

We have made a list of 11 ways CDPs can help you drive sales while also better understanding your customer base.

1) Know your customers across multiple devices or channels

The mandatory philosophy among marketers is that they should reach their customers on the right channel, at the right moment, and with the right messages and products. To do that, they need to let go of assumptions and understand exactly how users interact with them across different channels and devices.

With all such information concentrated in the CDP, marketers can tailor better experiences and advertising segmentation across devices, increasing campaign success chances

2) Accurately track shopping events

A CDP is a great tool for retailers and eCommerce as it tracks customers’ buying behaviors and relevant transactional data in significant volume. CDPs allow them to keep a consistent record of the products customers added to the cart, the duration of checkout and order completion, abandoned carts, and other information that is crucial for online operations.

3) Improve pricing

Collecting data from many sources – from your eCommerce website, app, or even physical stores – CDPs help you clarify how much customers are spending and how much they are willing to pay for your products according to their stage in the customer journey, search, and navigation patterns.

CDPs can also be connected to your supply chain systems to help you adjust costs and manage the relationship with suppliers, which are aspects that often impact pricing. With such information updated in real-time, you can be more assertive in your pricing strategy.

4) Offer personalized discounts and product recommendations

Having a holistic customer profile at hand also allows brands to offer clients personalized discounts and product recommendations that ultimately can turn them into loyal customers.

A study by Salesforce shows that 57% of customers are willing to share their data to exchange personalized offers or discounts. In comparison, 52% will share their data in exchange for product recommendations that meet their needs.

While knowing customers in detail, companies’ teams can offer precisely what users need to advance in the sales funnel – whether it is a discount, a free trial, reviews from peers, or a personal approach from the support team.

5) Connect physical and digital shopping experiences

For retailers that also operate offline, a CDP can connect insights from online and offline systems, which is often a challenge for companies looking forward to addressing omnichannel experiences. A survey from the CMO Council found only 7% of respondents said they are always able to deliver real-time, data-driven experiences across physical and digital touchpoints.

With a CDP, brands can offer better customer experience from the website to the physical store – and vice-versa – increasing sales opportunities.

6) Be quick to react to customers interactions

Being quick to answer customer’s signals is also crucial for both customer acquisition and retention strategies. Still, many marketers struggle with the amount of real-time insights they can access and act upon.

Research published by MediaPost, commissioned by technology consultancy Vanson Bourne, shows that only a minority of marketers feel they can immediately react to online customer interactions. According to the study, only 43% act quickly over customer behavior in the pre-purchase stage, 38% during purchase, and just 35% in the post-purchase phase.

By providing CRM, sales, and marketing teams with a continuous data stream, CDPs can make customer data more actionable. Isn’t that the point of having so much customer data?

7) Prevent churn and cart abandonment

Retail managers and online marketers are often investigating why customers abandon carts or churn after a few purchases. A CDP can give you deep insights into what stands in the way between your customers and the checkout.

It helps you spot gaps throughout the entire customer journey (and not just in specific channels) that might be leading customers to give up purchases. Are there problems with website usability? Is your customer support too slow?

By figuring out what is wrong, your team can work on fixing these gaps and segmenting churn prevention campaigns to attract customers back.

8) Optimize Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Conversion Rates

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable.

With the Customer Data Platform’s assertiveness, companies can better streamline marketing segmentation and customer success efforts, thus optimizing results related to Conversion Rates (CR), Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), and Customer Lifetime Value.

9) Qualify your leads

One of the best aspects of CDP for sales is that it allows you to qualify your leads better and nurture the relationship with customers across their entire lifecycle. Not only it supports marketers in optimizing strategies to attract qualified customers; it also gives you the necessary information to engage with customers who are ready to buy.

A study by Forbes shows, for instance, that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customers’ needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients and the chances of upselling them.

10) Enhance predictive marketing

Predicting customer behavior and preferences are what helps giant retailers like Amazon to drive sales. This marketing technique, which determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies, is essentially fueled by high volumes of customer data, which only a CDP could support.

Armed with a CDP, data scientists and marketing analysts can gather data from several sources and apply predictive models with a great accuracy level.

11) Improve attribution models

With so many touchpoints with the audience, it is often difficult for companies to determine accurate attribution models and discover which channels drive more sales. According to Google, almost 80% of all transaction value involves at least two marketing channel interactions – a number that can be much higher depending on your business’s complexity.

The Customer Data Platform can optimize the attribution framework since marketers can send attribution data to the CDP and have a more accurate view of campaign performance.

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Why CDPs are more complete than other data management platforms

So you have learned the many benefits that CDPs can bring to the table. Many leaders still ask themselves if they should ditch their existing data management tools for a CDP. What has to be clear for marketers and sales managers is that different data platforms don’t need to exclude each other.

A Customer Data Platform can potentialize the outcomes of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

In a survey by The Relevancy Group conducted in 2018 with US executive marketers, about 6 in 10 respondents said they were integrating CRM data into their CDP.

From a digital advertising perspective, CDPs can make the work of Data Management Platforms a lot more precise as well – with at least 29% of marketers feeding CDPs with digital advertising response data.

Although CDPs, DMPs, and CRM systems share some similarities, they all have different purposes within a company, with CDP serving as a primary data hub to make your teams more confident in responding to customers’ needs.

Want to become an expert in CDP?

If you plan to purchase a CDP for your company, the next step is to check out the platforms available in the market and consider which one is the best fit for your business goals.

If you feel like it is time to learn more about CDPs, we invite you to download our eBook Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing and sales.

The eBook will give you details about CDPs’ features, how they work, and how they can be incorporated into your marketing and sales strategies. We hope you enjoy it!

How Customer Data Platform is reinventing customer relations

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Natalia Gaal

Using a Customer Data Platform is helping companies to focus obsessively on their customers and benefit from their engagement.

You need to know your customers—this isn’t any news. It doesn’t matter if you want to make them more engaged, optimize your budget for campaigns, or improve your ROI.

Customer accurate information is at the heart of every company and should be treated correctly to generate powerful outcomes from your marketing efforts.

If you don’t have a consistent understanding of your consumers, then all your strategies will likely go down the drain.

But how exactly do you get to act like you know your customers? The answer is simple: by managing their data.

To treat data thoroughly and reach your customer relationship goals, you might come across the need to use the right technologies. This is when the Customer Data Platform (CDP) walks in.

A customer data platform monitors and tracks multiple data sources to bring relevant information to a single hub that is easy to access and understand.

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Once implemented, CDPs collect, integrate, manage, and analyze customer data continuously. These automated processes help many teams to focus on solving complex problems that require a human brain. At the same time, a Customer Data Platform brings current, real-time data to be leveraged and turned into marketing master plans.

Why do companies use Customer Data Platforms?

Is there a reason why companies implement a Customer Data Platform in their business models? Yes, many.

According to Gartner, plenty of marketers look to customer data-driven strategies to deliver growth. For example, marketers invested two-thirds of their budget in supporting relationships with their customers in 2017 and 2018.

Still, they have found the technology they were using to be frustrating—until CDP’s unique upshots came out as a solution to their problems.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out for several channels and concentrates real-time data in a single place your team can access whenever it is convenient.

This stimulates a collaborative work environment and speeds the pace of operational routines. Customer Data Platforms are also known for making marketers’ lives less complicated since automating workflows would take too many working hours to be accomplished.

The other reason companies use Customer Data Platforms is that they are much more than a simple database. According to the CDP Institute, the ideal Customer Data Platform should contain five essential capabilities:

Absorb data from any source
Give full details of ingested data
Store data without end and frequently
Create unified profiles (such as personas)
Share data with any system that needs it

All of the five skills above drive brands into having a vigorous understanding of their customer base by collecting and analyzing reliable data across their marketing channels.

What types of data does a Customer Data Platform assess?

The types of customer data assessed by a CDP can be quantitative and qualitative.

In other words, by using a CDP, you will be able to figure out:

How to identify your customers, using personal data
How to interact with your customers, using interactional data
How customers expect to be impacted by experiences, using behavioral data
How your customers perceive your brand, using attitudinal data

The datasets above are being generated at all times in any digital environment and should be combined to create an unbeatable and absolute customer understanding.

But how do CDPs gather such different information?

They reach out to analytics reports, engagement measures, support occurrences, eCommerce metrics, and customer feedback (to quote a few), to maximize your knowledge and equip you with fast, accurate moves.

This is the main reason why CDPs are revolutionizing the way brands communicate with customers and vice-versa. They are an unlimited and underlying base for companies to create remarkable customer experiences and increase customer engagement in a way we have never seen before.

The effects of CDP in customer experience

A Customer Data Platform grants companies an invincible competitive advantage: passionate customers who keep being fed with reasons to remain brand loyal.

Historically, we can see customers have adopted technologies faster than the brands they interact with. This made companies try to embrace digital transformation technologies focused on customer experience to reach out to consumers where they are and how they want.

Expanding your brand’s online presence to talk to customers in multiple channels isn’t enough, in any case. Any company can create an Instagram account and interact with its audience then and there, right?

However, the ones that truly stand out are focused on delivering personalized, relevant, well-designed interactions that take place as soon as customers want.

Tailored customer interactions should happen anywhere, at any time. This is the main reason why organizations around the world are digitizing their business models. According to the Boston Consulting Group Research, personalization will drive an $800 billion revenue shift to the top 15% of companies that work best on it, in only three industries.

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I know what you’re thinking: that’s much profit for a small number of companies—and yes, it is. Even so, it sounds like a warning: companies that aren’t ready to turn personalization ordinary in their marketing campaigns, will be left stranded.

As you know, doing a great job on personalization is all about knowing everything there is to know about your customers and quickly activating your knowledge when needed.

Can you notice any coincidences between this goal and the usage of a CDP?

How CDPs are reinventing customer relations

Suppose you’re leading digital initiatives to deepen the relationship between your customers and your brand. In that case, you should pay attention to the changes CDPs are leading in customer management and how it differs from other popular marketing tools.

A Customer Data Platform is way more complete than a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

CRM will tell you how to personalize and improve existing customer relationships. Meanwhile, a CDP will do that and indicate how you can promote products and services and what you should do to attract new customers.

With the new untapped potential CDPs unleash, companies are increasingly confident in meeting market changes and customers’ preferences. Hesitating in our competitive world is no longer an option, and data-driven marketing plays a vital role in feeding companies with unequivocal customer interactions.

Ahead, we have numbered a few ways Customer Data Platforms reinvent customer relations to inspire you and your team.

1. CDP enables segmentation opportunities

While it simultaneously optimizes strategies, a CDP provides companies with a 360-degree view of customers to act on an essential customer experience requirement: segmentation.

Segmenting customers by specific traits, behaviors, attitudes, and others is a fantastic opportunity to create tailored marketing touchpoints throughout their journey and attract them with meaningful content.

When based on data, segmentation is an unmatched growth engine that encourages customer loyalty and enhances profitability.

2. A CDP gives your interactions a personal touch

Similarly, you can not spell personalization without customer data.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will help you quickly access reliable information to customize customer interactions, making your consumers feel special, and long-term relationships feasible.

Many companies are using CDP for Customer Data Management. See below how their tactics connect with top-level personalization:

3. A CDP enriches customer relationships

There isn’t enough emphasis on how knowing your customers is essential for customer relations.

People expect to be treated accordingly to their visions as much as they wish to connect emotionally with brands. A single miscommunication can harm brand-customer relationships irreparably.

As soon as you have a panoramic view of your customers’ habits, preferences, needs, and issues, you should feel more confident in building specific touchpoints that elevate the customer journey and make customers want to hang around you for longer.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will also measure your customer loyalty programs’ effectiveness and help you find what groups of customers deserve attention according to their life cycle.

4. A CDP is agile

Agile methodologies are the perfect response to a world that is changing every day, every hour. CDPs consider our ever-changing environment and let your team access specific data whenever it needs, contributing to an agility mindset.

Agility layers can be used to shape CDP frameworks that adjust to your company’s infrastructure, turning data sharing into a reality. CDPs also absorb data from other internal systems, like CRMs and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), you might already have.

Apart from that, CDPs update in real-time. This allows you to assess micro-moments data and instantly operationalize it.

5. A CDP ingests data from any source

Your customers are everywhere these days, right? You can find them on social media, navigate your website, read your emails, download your app, and take a look at your physical store. The interaction possibilities between your customer and your brand are countless.

If truth be told, it truly doesn’t matter where your customers are and what they’re doing. Whether they’re reading your blog or using your chatbot, data is being generated at all times, collected from simple interactions to complex operations.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out to any source of information, from Live Chats to SEO, from blogging to Twitter, from customer loyalty to affiliate marketing programs to provide your company with everything you know about your potential and current consumers.

6. A CDP elevates digital transformation

Simply, a digital transformation process should rely on—and a lot!—on a Customer Data Platform.

By watching digital-native organizations, it becomes clear that many technologies can be embedded to digitize businesses.

However, it is worthless to implement technologies that don’t accurately connect with customers’ needs. Digital transformation starts and ends with the customer, transcending traditional marketing, sales, and customer service roles.

That being said, without a reliable Customer Data Platform, companies who are digitizing their operations will mostly fail to unleash the real potential of a digital transformation.

Digital-native companies have already built their business model based on data collection and responding to customers’ needs with high-level experiences.

These companies combine traditional marketing strategies, such as loyalty programs, with groundbreaking digital initiatives that connect with customers in real-time and engross their engagement.

Remember: It is crucial to direct your digital transformation efforts into interactions that engage your audience, and a Customer Data Platform is intimately related to that.

It taps into your databases to unify relevant information and operationalize customer knowledge, delivering targeted experiences that will delight and retain your customers.

It should also be stated that CDPs assist companies in taking a step back and revisiting their processes to leverage technology cleverly.

For example, Netflix was quick to turn its service into a scalable streaming platform that replies to customers’ demands. The now-sector-leading company could only reinvent itself because it took a very attentive look at customer data and responded accordingly.

Align your digital initiatives with the power of a Customer Data Platform

While IT staff has been skeptical for a while, digital leaders worldwide have been engrossing CDP in their workflows and getting amazing results from data management automation.

Not only has perfect treating data been helping these leaders come up with customer-centric solutions, but it has optimized their budget and turned manual work more effective.

Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of surveyed organizations stated a Customer Data Platform is helping drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

Arena serves customers from 120 different countries and sees firsthand how the fast-paced digital environment influences global market changes day after day.

That is why we work to build awareness for digital leaders and marketers to embrace Customer Data Platforms in their full potential and boost customer engagement.

In case you need to further your research towards the CDP role for the upcoming years, download our Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales ebook and take a deeper dive.

30 reasons to use Customer Data Platform for eCommerce

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Arena

Information is king, and businesses are constantly on the lookout for tools that can provide a richer understanding of their customers and the journey they embark upon. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have emerged as crucial tools, particularly for the burgeoning realm of eCommerce.

30 Reasons To Use A CDP

Here’s a deep dive into why CDPs should be at the heart of your digital strategy:

1. Seamless Automation

Trust in a CDP to transform complex data streams into easily digestible and actionable insights, automating processes that would otherwise drain resources.

2. Eliminating Operational Silos

Facilitate efficient information-sharing across departments with a CDP, creating a unified vision for your business.

3. Enriching the Customer Journey

Harness CDPs to unlock a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s interactions, ensuring you’re always delivering value.

4. Intelligent Marketing Segmentation

Harness the power of AI to sift through varied data, empowering you to create precisely targeted marketing campaigns.

5. Tailored Communication

Today’s consumer demands personalization. With a CDP, ensure every touchpoint resonates and builds loyalty.

6. Crafting Memorable Experiences

Use data-driven insights to craft seamless experiences, both online and offline, enhancing customer satisfaction.

7. Metrics that Matter

Deploy CDPs to get an eagle’s eye view on the efficacy of your eCommerce strategies, refining them as you grow.

8. Real-time Relevance

In an ever-changing market landscape, CDPs ensure you’re always a step ahead, thanks to real-time data updates.

9. 360-Degree Customer View

Break down the barriers between online and offline data to truly understand your customer’s journey.

10. Unified Customer Profiles

Leverage a CDP to get an in-depth understanding of your audience personas, refining your marketing strategies.

11. Stand Out from the Crowd

Responsive data-driven strategies ensure you’re always ahead of the curve, a must in today’s competitive marketplace.

12. Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value

Invest in understanding your current customers’ needs and behaviors, ensuring they remain loyal advocates.

13. Merging Digital and Physical

Achieve true omnichannel success by merging online and offline data streams.

14. Refining Offerings

Listen to your customers. Let their feedback guide improvements in your products and services.

15. Attracting Ready Buyers

Precision-target your messaging to capture those on the cusp of purchase.

16. Deep Customer Engagement

Leverage CDP insights to truly engage customers across every touchpoint, building loyalty and trust.

17. Enhancing Marketing Tools

Amplify the efficiency of your current marketing tools by integrating them with a powerful CDP.

18. Spotting and Addressing Anomalies

Ensure your strategy is always on track by identifying and rectifying any anomalies.

19. Anticipating Customer Behavior

Predict future customer actions and behaviors, refining your strategies for maximum impact.

20. Optimized Operational Efficiency

Drive efficiency by streamlining data processes, freeing up resources for strategic action.

21. Strategic Pricing

Ensure your pricing remains competitive and appealing by gauging customer sentiment and market trends.

22. Effective Supplier Negotiations

Utilize historical data to drive better deals and collaborations with suppliers.

23. Never Miss Feedback

Continuous monitoring ensures you’re always in the loop, adjusting strategies based on real-time feedback.

24. Minimize Cart Abandonment

Dive deep into the reasons behind cart abandonment, ensuring your checkout process is as smooth as possible.

25. Addressing Checkout Drop-offs

Investigate and rectify factors causing customers to abandon checkouts, maximizing conversions.

26. Tackling Churn Rates

Unearth the reasons behind dwindling customer loyalty and rectify them, building a lasting relationship.

27. Boosting Conversion Rates

Harness data insights to optimize your site’s usability and messaging, driving higher conversions.

28. Driving Organic Traffic

Strategically leverage live content and social media to naturally increase site visitors.

29. Elevating Social Media Engagement

Deepen customer relationships by engaging them on social platforms, turning followers into loyal customers.

30. Embrace the Future

Data is the future of marketing and sales. Integrate a CDP into your strategy and ensure your brand remains at the forefront.

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For a comprehensive understanding of the transformative power of CDPs, delve into Arena’s ebook Diving Into The Customer Journey In Live Ecommerce. The insights within can be the key to unlocking the full potential of your eCommerce strategy.

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An essential guide to Customer Data

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Paola Magni

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences.

Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with strategies that cover the market’s lacking points and elevate your marketing to a more meaningful approach.

We are witnessing a new customer era. Every company’s engines work daily to think, develop, and incorporate business and marketing strategies that put customers at the center of everything they do.

This new approach does not strike the market as a surprise. For the past years, with so much information in the palm of their hands, customers became more demanding and more willing to connect with brands that make proper use of their information to deliver more than just basic products and services.

If you have been paying attention, you already know customers value experiences more than anything else these days. This means true engagement will only be achieved by a remarkable customer experience that elevates your brand and creates a sense of connection with your audience. However, planning an exceptional customer experience takes a wide understanding and a sharp knowledge of how to solve consumers’ issues.

That is why customer data is definitely here to stay.

What is customer data and why does it matter?

Customer data is all the information a company gets from consumers whenever they interact with it. Whether it is personal, psychological, or demographic, customer data help companies clarify facts and avoid assumptions when thinking and refining business strategies related to customer experience.

The importance of customer data is related to the incessant need to build a strong customer understanding. Many organizations have already noticed that, by using data as a pillar, their operations draw near customer satisfaction and proper marketing approaches that return investments and reduces waste. On the other hand, without concise information about their customer base, companies fail to engage their audience and make sense of the many market opportunities datasets provide.

Customer experiences are tremendously affected by customer data, which means the right data extraction, validation and analysis are crucial to generate accurate outcomes that will enhance marketing and business plans. Customer data matters so many companies have embarked on customer data management (CDM) to correctly address data in their goals and daily work.

With trustworthy data at the palm of your hand, you will feel more confident in tactics to contact, acquire, and retain your customers, keeping their interest, and offering them exceptional engaging interactions. Customer data will also support your financial decisions, assisting you in where and when to allocate your budget.

How is customer data created?

As you read, a massive amount of data is being created. All around the world, people are navigating desktop and mobile devices. It doesn’t matter if they are shopping, replying to an online survey, or filling a lead form to get in touch with a software development company. Each of their digital interactions with brands creates data — which continuously provides the basis for algorithms to produce more data.

According to Deloitte in its Global Marketing Trends 2020 report, 90% of all global data were produced in the last two years, considering more than 26 billion smart devices circulating the globe.

Aware of data potential, the market has amended digital initiatives to maximize data collection, extraction, and validation methods. Big data analytics have been embedded to extract useful information from huge datasets, such as CRMs, that can’t be manually validated. Simultaneously, data scientists have been growing as popular as the need to adopt a data-driven culture.

These market signs alone are an extremely important indication that data is everywhere, and companies that don’t welcome it proactively will be in a tight spot.

Types of Customer Data

Customer data is separated into four main categories. In their own way, these categories will help you enhance the customer experience in different and empowering perspectives.

Personal data

Also known as identity and basic data, this type of information allows customers to be recognized by individual details and is divided into linked and linkable information.

Every information that can be used to identify a person without extra details is linked personal data — full names and emails, for example. Date of birth, physical address, and phone numbers are linked personal data too.

Now, linkable information doesn’t identify on its own. Still, when combined with other pieces of information, it is useful to draw a bigger picture. ZIP codes, age, gender, job titles, education level, marital status, and number of children are examples of linkable personal data.

Interaction data

If you ever wondered how your customers behave on your website, or how they interact with your emails and your social media accounts, interaction data will answer all of your questions.

Sometimes known as engagement data, interaction data brings a meaningful and solid viewpoint of how customers interact with your brand’s touchpoints.

Examples of interaction data are: Time spent on your website, page views, social media engagement, traffic sources, customer service feedback, and paid ad conversions.

Behavioral data

If you want to know how customers respond to experiences with your products and services, pay attention to behavioral data.

This type of data assists you to have a deeper understanding of behavior patterns your customers have throughout the purchase journey. This means interaction data may or not be considered behavioral data — it depends on the big picture and the goals you wish to achieve.

Some examples of behavioral information you can track are: Previous purchases, website heat-maps, customer loyalty program usage, repeated actions related to your products, and CTAs clicked.

Attitudinal data

The fourth and last type of customer data is related to how consumers perceive your brand. Unlike metrics you can easily measure, such as product purchases, click rates, website visits, and social network interactions, attitudinal data refers to emotions and individual opinions. It embraces feelings, which makes them highly subjective — that explains why this type of data is also referred to as qualitative data.

Continuously mining through attitudinal data will get you closer to proactively responding to consumers’ issues and anticipating trends they might be interested in. This is the perfect chance to get to know your consumers’ individual preferences and their point of view towards topics that interest you.

Attitudinal data examples are: Customer lifestyle, motivations, pain points, sentiments, and desirability. Customer reviews are excellent to gauge this sort of information.

Collecting customer data

As we have already emphasized, digital transformation has made every channel a powerful source of customer data. If your customers are interacting with your marketing and shopping channels, you can easily extract customer data from them using Customer Data Platforms (CDP).

There are several ways to collect customer data from distinct data points, and they depend on your goals.

That being said, before jumping to conclusions on which channel is the best to collect data from, make sure you address your data goals first. Is it to accelerate revenue? Develop new products? Get a more precise understanding if you ought to invest in a new marketing campaign? Start with the why, and then move forward.

More than predicting upcoming trends, recall that customer data should be highly attached to things that happened in the past. Past customer sales, buying decision patterns, abandonment rates (and much more) can be extracted from customer data to develop better strategies that respond directly to what your consumers did and said months, weeks, and days ago.

We have compiled some collecting data options ahead.

1. Website Analytics

Web analytics reports are excellent to understand what is resonating with your audience and how they are talking back to you.

When investigating this type of report, remember behavioral data insights can be extracted from heat-maps, bounce rate, page views, and even the devices your target market uses the most.

2. Social media engagement

Social media-based data can tell you a lot of things. Shares, likes, and comments on social media are basic engaging metrics you can measure to understand what customers think about your brand and what type of message they enjoy. You will likely get a good amount of data from social media analytics to make sense of customers’ sentiment towards you.

We highly recommend you to go even further and run social listening while analyzing social media insights. This will guarantee you interpret your customers’ interactions more accurately.

3. Customer interviews and feedback surveys

Feedback is crucial. Whether customers love what you’re doing or criticize it, you need to be available to take their considerations and opinions into account.

When done right, customer interviews, and feedback surveys will gather your audience’s interests, opinions, preferences, and how you can improve your products and services to serve them better.

Another data collection suggestion is to investigate customer churn. This explains the reason why some customers buy from you for a while and then leave. What affected their experience so they felt like not coming back? Is there anything you can do to improve this experience and avoid other customers from turning their backs on you?

If you’re looking for ways to extract behavioral and attitudinal data, consider searching for customer feedback and combine this information with other data to get a bigger picture.

4. Contact information

Contact information is vital to customer data. If you wish to communicate with your consumers, you should know where to find them according to the stage of their journey.

From phones to physical addresses and social media, contact information is needed to build a good amount of personal data you can rely on.

5. Customer service

Customer service is related to feedback but contains high potential itself. It is critical to allow customers to reach out to customer service software enabled to bring useful data your way.

As a consequence, customers can quickly seek help for big and small issues and solve their problems more easily all while providing you with more information.

Validating customer data

As vital as it is, customer data is useful when you are ready to properly extract and validate it. This means you need to find actual helpful information from your data sources, and pull them out to understand how valuable they are. This is what we call data extraction — and it will prevent you from swimming in a random sea of data.

Data extraction uses the right tools to streamline data from customer experience to marketing, and makes sure the information provided is useful for your teams to make better decisions.

To avoid wasting all the money, time, and effort you put into collecting data, there are some essential considerations about customer data validation you should pay attention to:

Customer data must be a source of truth and facts about your audience: Above all things, remember customer data is supposed to assist you in using factual information to come up with fitting solutions. For this reason, the data you extract must be reliable and revolve around your clients. If the data you’re extracting isn’t customer-centric, you better reconsider why it is important.

Customer data must be goal-oriented: Exploring multi-channels to extract data from without a clear goal in mind might lead you to conclusions that don’t make much sense. Make sure you know what your goals are from the beginning and set milestones to measure your progress. This will help you visualize how much data is affecting your operations and what else can be done.

Customer data must be integrated: Thanks to technology, data can now be transferred from one channel to another in a matter of seconds — and that is essential to every company that needs fresh information to anticipate opportunities and maximize their potential. By using customer data integration (CDI) tools, you ensure information gets to the right people and set a pattern to collect, organize, unify, and visualize customer data wholesomely. Best of all, CDI automates these processes and cuts down routines that take time. This means your human resources will have more time to focus on what they’re good at: Finding perfect responses to all the data software and algorithms have extracted and assembled for you.

Customer data must be contextualized: In-house data, also known as first-party data, should be combined with external data to give the information you’re putting your hands in a more precise context. There are two types of external data you can blend with your in-house insights to ensure a broader understanding: second party data and third party data. The second party data is the information provided by another company towards the audience that interests you — this type of data is usually shared between partners. In the meantime, third party data is collected by companies that don’t have a link to customers and sell information to other organizations. These data types can enrich your first-party data and elevate your insights.

Customer Data Analysis

Customer data analysis is crucial to any customer data strategy. Wrong data analysis might cause disconnected and poor responses from brands to erupt and bother customers with interactions they don’t need nor asked for.

As complex as it might sound to gather validated data to be analyzed, some special technologies can help the process be smoother and more efficient. Data mining is one of them. By mixing machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence (AI), data mining can analyze loads of data using sharp techniques —and the greatest thing about it is that its analysis is automatic.

Analyzing quantitative data

When it comes to quantitative data, you might come across the need to categorize it according to some classifications and segmentations. Or, perhaps, you will notice it is necessary to relate different data points and comprehend how specific characteristics affect the customer experience. Luckily, data mining provides many programmatic settings that can be adjusted to return the insights you are looking for.

If you’re willing to fragment customers to create more dynamic and creative ads, customer data analysis will help you find segmentation opportunities. If your team needs to associate behavioral patterns to develop a new campaign, customer data analysis will gather helpful information to predict how people will respond to your strategy. The opportunities are countless.

Analyzing qualitative data

On the other side, when we talk about qualitative data, many companies face the challenge of making sense of subjective information, such as sentiment. People’s emotions and feelings vary individually, and being stuck in the middle of so many variations is an uncertain place for your company to be at. If you’re wondering how to absorb valuable insights from this context, we have good news for you: there are ways technology can track important keywords to translate qualitative data into actionable decisions.

When analyzing qualitative data, pay attention to patterns that might make the situation clearer. Are your customers using the same keywords when they give feedback? Are the stories they tell somehow similar? Are there common elements in the ideas they communicate that can help you create a further sense of how they feel about your brand?

Take advantage of what customers say to you in feedback interviews, surveys, and methods of the sort, to gather enough data and take action.

Benefits of Customer Data Analysis

Relying on customer data will benefit you in countless ways. To help you understand how, we’ve listed some benefits in-detail right ahead:

1. Segmentation

Segmenting your customers is a smart way to get a broader view of what their issues are and how you can reach out to them more effectively. Separating them by age, demographics, gender, job title, and more makes it easier to plan specific marketing campaigns that will straightforwardly attract them, whether your goal is to attract them, engage them or make them buy more.

2. Personalization

People no longer wish to be contacted with general messages that lack a personal touch. Customer experience is a synonym of personalization and, if you don’t use data-based strategies to customize interactions with your consumers, it is highly likely that they will get frustrated by irrelevant content and mass communication. In contrast, personalization increases service quality and customer satisfaction.

3. Deeper audience understanding

Data is becoming the centerpiece of companies that desire is to remain relevant in customers’ minds. This happens because, without a detailed and precise understanding of their audience, companies will hardly add value to their customer base.

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences. Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with solutions around creative, data, and media — the right combination to empower your marketing and business approaches.

4. Revenue

When used correctly, customer data helps you understand how to increase your consumers’ loyalty and lifetime value, reducing churn at the same time. It also gives you a better understanding of where to invest in valuable campaigns and trends that will bring you more ROI.

5. Humanization

Human connection isn’t just another trend. The fact customers need to embrace companies with a purpose is changing their relationships with brands. People don’t want to be treated as a transaction. On the contrary, they expect companies to act authentically and be transparent in what they believe in, treating them individually. Pulling the right customer data contributes to humanize your brand so it corresponds to these expectations. It also frees your team to have more time to focus on how to genuinely engage customers.

Data-base your decisions

Now that you’ve come to the end of this article, you know there isn’t space for assumptions to guide your brand’s decisions anymore. More than ever, new ideas and improvements need to connect with customers’ expectations. In this context, embracing the right technologies to collect, extract, validate, and analyze data is crucial.

To find out more advantages that the use of Customer Data can provide for your company, contact one of our consultants, and resolve any doubts on the subject.

Customer Centric: what is it, benefits, and how to apply this strategy

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Paola Magni

A customer-centric approach is nothing new in businesses, but it is transforming the way companies work nowadays. It’s time to understand more about it.

Being customer-centric is not a new conception in the market. However, with the changes in customer behavior these days, it’s a strategy that is becoming more popular. It’s not only about focusing on the customers, but it’s also about making them the core of your business.

Some time ago, industries used to lead product-centered strategies, meaning that if a product wasn’t selling well, it needed to be renewed and improved. However, as time went by, marketing professionals started to notice the problem was not in the product, but in who was buying it. If you don’t have the right consumer, there’s no point in having the highest quality solution in the market.

Because of that, customer-centric is becoming more and more popular. As a matter of fact, this is far from being a brand-new concept. Companies have known it for ages, but it seems like the notion of it really started to gain attention in recent years.

Since customers now are more educated and informed, their expectations are getting higher by the day. If the company doesn’t find a way to live up to that, it will most likely not survive in the market. To genuinely build the right product and invest in the right marketing campaigns, following a customer-centric strategy is ideal.

What is customer-centric?

Also knowns as client-centric or customer-centricity, this is an approach that aims to put the customer in the center of everything. All strategies and actions the company makes are addressed to the customer. So, if an idea doesn’t fulfill the “will our customer want and like this?” aspect, it probably will be left aside.

Clients are the purpose of a company even starting to work and for that reason, they need to be satisfied with their acquisitions. That means paying attention to the consumer before, during, and after a sale happens — therefore, being directed related to customer experience. The goal is to provide the most positive experience possible.

For a business to have good results, being customer-centric shouldn’t be just a strategy. It should be the core of everything it’s done, creating a customer-centric culture inside the company. That way, every product, service, and publicity will happen around the consumer’s needs and pain points. Because of that, one of the most important things here is to know your consumer.

It’s more than creating a good product, it’s about developing something that’s so good and fit to the client that they don’t want to buy from anywhere else. This approach is to increase customer loyalty and retention rates.

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What are the benefits of customer-centric?

Aside from knowing the consumer and creating all the picture-perfect products and ads for them, there is much more we can talk about a customer-centric approach. All the benefits it brings to a business are surely in your interest, so this is what we’ll address next.

Increase the customer lifetime value

In recent days, new customers are more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. For that reason, when you work with a customer-centric method, you will eventually increase the customer lifetime value.

In other words, a strategy such as putting the customer at the core of the business will, consequently, give the clients more reasons to be loyal to the brand. That’s what the company needs to focus on: strategies to make current customers buy more and frequently.

Moreover, this will lead to an increase in retention rates and also in overall profits. In fact, a mere 5% increase in customer retention leads to at least a 25% increase in profits — but it can be up to 95%.

Anticipate customers needs

Every area in the market has its competition and it’s important to be known as the innovator. When a customer is at the center of strategies, the problems they have will be explored so the company knows what to look at when building their solutions. With a thorough data collection in real-time, it’s possible to anticipate customer behavior and offer accurate, original products.

Gain a competitive edge

With loyal customers and a real-time data collection strategy, your company will become a strong competitor. Every business will be looking at you as an example of what to do and how to achieve success.

With so much alike solutions and prices, positive customer experience will be the differential of the brand. It’s actually common to see people pay more on services because they offer a unique experience — rather than because of quality.

How to become customer-centric

Well, surely, put the customer at the center of the strategy is the first thing that comes to mind. But it’s about much more than that. To truly enjoy all the advantages of this strategy, there is a need to work with empathy. This means, basically, what we’ve been saying so far:

First look at the customer, then work on the product.

Since the rise of the internet, customer behavior has been in constant innovation. Every year companies need to renew their strategies so they can keep up with the changes. The good thing is technology has found its way to be one step ahead by creating data-collection platforms that help understand who is the consumer and how they act online.

Overall, some characteristics of a customer-centric business are:

use customer data to understand the customer base;
analyze who are the best customers and focus on products for them;
give special attention to customer success and experience;
practice audience engagement;
identity opportunities and make data-driven actions.

By using a Customer Data Platform, all information available about a brand’s consumers will be at easy access. From names, ages, and demographic to time spent online, and pages visited. The CDP can collect data from all channels and sources the company is connected with, such as website, online store, social media, payment systems, app, and so on. That’s why a customer-centric approach should be accompanied by a CDP solution.

The more you know about a customer, the better the chances are of having a successful customer-centric strategy. As a matter of fact, to implement this method in your company, it needs to go beyond marketing and sales teams. The entire firm should follow a customer-centric culture. This means customer support, product team, engineers, and whatever other sectors the company has will all be focused on learning and working around the customer.

In addition, it’s important to remember results don’t come overnight. This plan is a long-term project of building durable relationships and providing positive experiences over and over again. After all, customer acquisition costs are way higher than maintaining a devoted customer base. In order for that to happen, the brand needs to be in regular communication with the customer, whether over chats, email, or social media.

Customer-centric marketing

It’s was pretty much implicit that this approach could be used to marketing-related actions. For one, you can’t build a customer relationship without the help of the marketing sector. Indeed, performing an Inbound Marketing plan and delivering content is essential to establish bonds with an audience.

With the assistance of a Customer Data Platform, while being a customer-centric company, every moment of the customer experience can be thought of with minimum effort. Surely, it’s still something that requires the full attention of marketing professionals. However, they can focus more on planning strategies and content than on analyzing data and metrics.

The entire customer journey has to be worked in a marketing strategy. This means personalized content and ads will be sent at every stage of the journey. Even after a purchase is finished, marketing needs to be creating the right materials to send the customer. It’s the only way they’ll become loyal to the brand, maybe even turning into brand advocates and promoters.

Moreover, based on purchase history and engagement with the brand, personalized recommendations will have a great effect in strengthening the relationship. The essential is focusing on what the customer wants — something you’ll be able to do through data analysis.

How a customer-centric approach impacts sales

In the old days, a sales process was demanding for the salesperson. They had to know every little detail about the product or service and have the ability to negotiate to close as many deals as possible. Nowadays, with the customer-centric strategy, things have taken a turn.

Since the customer is the focal point, a sales rep is no longer the person who showcases the product and tries to sell it at any cost. In fact, they understand the customer pain points, wishes, and demands so they can perform as a consultant — demonstrating how certain products will help solve their issues.

Because of this, it’s just as important for a sales team to have access to CDP data as a marketing team. Customer data is crucial to understand their journey and what is the best way to act in each particular moment. Even though a customer-centric strategy doesn’t attract many new consumers, it does keep the existing client base more loyal. For this reason, identifying the most valuable customers, the ones that generate profits, is a way to assist sales professionals chose their target better.

Customer-centric and customer experience

You must have noticed that customer experience has been mentioned a few times throughout your reading. That’s because there is a relationship between customer-centric and customer experience. But what is it?

In general, customer experience is the relationship a client has with the brand. From their perception at the first contact to their satisfaction after buying a product, every step of the way is a potential influence on their experience. Therefore, a customer-centric company needs to bring a positive customer experience at every moment of the customer journey

Brands that apply Customer-Centric

For a better comprehension of how a customer-centric company performs (and their results), a few examples can be brought here. These three companies are stand-outs in working with their customers at the center of everything. However, there are many more to keep an eye on for inspiration, such as Nike — their empathy really shows in every marketing campaign they launch.

Amazon

If you have the habit of doing online shopping, you probably already got something from Amazon. Do you remember how was the experience? This is a brand that nobody can question the customer is at the center of their attention. Everything they do is to improve the customer experience.

Details like the 1-click purchase using data previously saved make a difference in obtaining customer loyalty. Besides, people are always talking about their delivery service — they are fast and accurate with their deadlines. Thus, customer satisfaction is never a problem in their hands.

Disney

Disney is a brand that embraces lots of different products and services, such as animated movies, TV channels, and amusement parks. Nonetheless, it’s noticeable how all of their actions are directed to their clients. They work hard to keep their customer-centric culture remarkable. This means customer-centric works beyond digital strategies.

The thing is, people can see the value in the brand. They happily pay more to go to Disney’s park then they would to go to any other park.

Slack

Even though this isn’t such a recognized brand as the other two, it’s still worth mentioning their method of work. Slack is a cloud-based communication company that is rapidly growing. Their approach is totally concentrated on the customer experience.

Instead of having a group of professionals that knows every single detail of the product, they focus on certain areas of expertise. That way, when a customer contacts the team with a question, they are redirected to an expert in the area.

Plus, customer service and product development work in union to always update the service as they notice customers’ needs. Slack is a brand known to be open to feedback from their clients, so more than gathering data, they are regularly monitoring brand mentions so they can meet customers’ expectations.

How to measure the success of a Customer-Centric strategy

So, you’ve established a customer-centric approach in your company and got everyone working towards it. How do you know if you’re having the desired results? There are three metrics that will give you the answer: churn rate, net promoter score, and customer lifetime value.

Churn rate

First of all, the churn rate. This metric is related to the number of customers who no longer interact and buy your products. To measure it, it’s necessary to divide the number of customers who left in a certain time period (1 month, 6 months, 12 months, and so on) by the average number of costumers in the same time period. If you lost 10 customers out of 100, for example, your churn rate will be 10%.

Since you want your customers to keep engaged and buying from you, in order to have a successful customer-centric approach, your churn rate needs to be the lowest possible.

Net promoter score (NPS)

The NPS, or net promoter score, is about measuring customer loyalty. There is one simple question that revolves around this metric: “how likely are you to recommend us to friends?”. And, in a 0 to 10 scale, people can be classified as detractors, passives, or promoters.

Detractors: From 0 up to 6, they are the first kind, the detractors. It means they are not happy with the product or service and are likely to share negative experiences.
Passives: Between 7 and 8, customers are happy, but not loyal.
Promoters: Lastly, when the classification is 9 and 10, people are most likely brand promoters. This means they are not only satisfied with the brand, but also share positive experiences about it.

Once these data become available, the calculus should be the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. The results need to be higher than 70%, but ideally, for a customer-centric company, they need to be around 80% to 100%.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

The customer-centric strategy is based on creating a long-term healthy relationship with the customers. So, measuring the customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a way to see if your plans are having positive outcomes.

The calculus is multiplying total revenue by the time of the relationship with the customer (total revenue X average customer lifetime).

CLV measures the revenue a customer generates to the company for as long as they are paying customers. This is the best metric to understand before and after results when applying the customer-centric approach to your business.

Here at Arena, we have the best CDP solution for your business. With our real-time data collection, you’ll be able to know exactly who is your consumer and how to work thinking about them. Learn more about our solutions by talking to a consultant.