Tag Archives: Live Chat

14 Ways Live Chat a Customer Service Game-Changer

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

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

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

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

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

The context behind Live Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Live Chat can take Customer Experience to the next level

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

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

1) Enhancing brand experience

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

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

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

2) Providing fast responses

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

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

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

3) Decreasing resolution time 

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

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

4) Boosting brands Net Promoter Score (NPS)

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

5) Non-intrusive communication

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

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

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

6) Using Live Chat Data to improve overall business 

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

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

You can use Live Chat customer insights for:

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

7) Understanding where customers come from

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

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

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

8)  Increasing conversion rates

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

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

9) Avoiding repetitive tasks for customers and support agents

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

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

10) Increasing customers Lifetime Value (LTV) 

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

11) Cross-selling and upselling products 

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

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

12) Increasing customer engagement

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

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

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

13) Increasing productivity in Customer Care

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

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

14) Human touch

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The Future of Customer Experience

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The first Arena Customer Experience and Data Live Event is happening soon! Arena GO will introduce you to the tools that connect all user data dots to create world-class customer experiences.

The Future of Customer Experience

In the digital era, capturing and owning the right data is the recipe for success. Business solutions must be integrated and condensed in a single touchpoint, instead of being pulverized and lacking coherence. A-list services platforms, such as Arena, understand the importance of guiding strategies throughout the entire customer journey.

This unique 360º view of the user allows the brand to follow the customer along the entire buyer’s journey, from lead acquisition to purchase, until post-sales services. That’s because Arena provides the right tools to create a data driven and highly personalized customer experience.

At Arena GO you will explore our real-time customer experience data platform, discover our tools, and link them to serve relevant, meaningful, and engaging content.

You will be able to create an environment with powerful triggers to achieve your purposes, whether it is a purchase, a new subscription, or whatever else you need.

Learn how to explore real-time possibilities better, and exceed your customers’ expectations. 

At Arena Go, We will walk you through product demos and use cases to give you a glimpse of the future of customer engagement.

Customer Experience

What does your audience want? Why do they want it? How? When? If key-questions like those aren’t guiding you through your CX strategy, the odds of failure are higher.

That is because you are not building a connected experience for your customer. Although, when you count on tools, such as Customer Data Platform (CDP), that provide you high-quality data analysis, you can tailor each stage of the strategy based on real demands and information.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A strategy that is not data-oriented can’t really be called “strategy”. 

Having Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP), a unified data source that gathers all your touchpoints in a single place, will offer you the most reliable insights to build up a killer strategy for your audience.

Besides gathering the data, Arena’s CDP analyses it and creates organized clusters of customers with matching information. As a result, you will have much more depth of knowledge about your customer. It will feel like you are looking at a picture of them to truly understand their needs.

Live Chat

As we have said before, using real-time solutions is the way to exceed customers’ expectations. So, having Arena’s Live Chat allows you to engage in real-time with the audience while they are browsing on your website. That will enable you to create meaningful approaches, increasing the value of your customer’s experience.

Whether it is a reactive contact (which is when the customer looks up to you when they need something; to get a question answered, to get more information, etc.); or a proactive one (when your team approaches the audience to offer something able to raise the value of that browsing moment) Live Chat can be the most strategic and successful way to do it.

Live Blog

Still following the steps of creating meaningful real-time engagement, Live Blog is the answer companies needed to increase browsing time.

Through Arena’s Live Blog, you can create live coverage of an event, display updated news, use text, audio, video, and extra-sources. All on a single screen!

Your audience won’t need to look up for updates on other pages or keep refreshing the website to check if there is anything new. Also, using Arena’s Live Blog, the audience will be able to simultaneously engage that content on their social media pages without shifting tabs and bouncing off of you.

Rogers Media increased engagement by 64% using Arena

One of the world’s largest communications and media companies, the Canadian Rogers, was looking for a smarter and more efficient way to make their audience engage with their content and, thereafter, increase retention. They needed straightforward ways to integrate other tools used by more than 50 teams. 

Combining the power of the Live Chat, Live Blog, and the Content Wall to cover real-time events, Rogers was able to promote users’ interactions in their multiple domain channels. At Sportsnet, for example, Arena’s Live Blog covered all the matches with exclusive content, and Live Chat enabled fans to engage with passionate discussions during the games.

As a result, Arena helped Rogers to increase their engagement by 64%, and retention by 28%. Besides, their ROI skyrocketed, increasing the numbers of new subscriptions, app downloads, and advertisement revenue.

Globo brings real-time coverage to the next level with the NBA 

The second-largest commercial TV network in the world, Globo TV was a pioneer by adopting two of Arena’s Customer Experience solutions to broadcast the NBA Live finals. Globo was looking for fresh and real-time alternatives to provide relevant and valuable content to their audience.

By using Arena’s Live Blog to cover NBA Live matches play-by-play, with Arena’s Live Chat to create an environment of enriched engagements, Globo had audience peaks of tens of thousands of users simultaneously. 

Arena helped Globo understand the importance of delivering dynamic and interactive content for such an amazing event, during all the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, which was the key to a successful strategy.

Providing multimedia content and an innovative experience paid off well for Globo. Their user engagement had amazing growth, as well as the time the audience spent on their domains and the higher ROI.

Tecmundo covered Amazon Prime Day and boosted engagement

One of Brazil’s most popular technology websites, Tecmundo, combined Arena’s solution to bring massive traffic to their page and increase revenue during Amazon Prime Day. 

Creating a unique environment, what Tecmundo did was pretty much comparable to a real store during Black Friday season: it had customer interactions, conversations, and lots of sales. 

Prime Day is the most profitable day of the year for eCommerce. On that day, Tecmundo created a hot site to cover Amazon’s best deals in real-time using Arena’s Live Blog. To stimulate users’ engagement, they also had Arena’s Live Chat. 

The audience could get the offers while they had ongoing discussions about them, the products, and providing honest customer reviews. 

The complete solution made by Arena to Tecmundo also used the Customer Data Platform (CDP). As a result, they gathered data from different touchpoints, enabling companies to find out where their potential customers were. By doing that, a more assertive approach was made and better deals were closed.

Arena GO

To dive into the possibilities of Arena’s real-time customer experience and data platform, Arena GO is an open event to walk you through the construction of consistent and effective customer engagement strategies.

31 Live Chat Black Friday statistics you must see

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

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

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

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

How Live Chat can impact your business

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

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

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

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

We can prove it:

Live Chat statistics you need to know

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

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

Customer support and satisfaction

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

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

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

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

Lead generation & Conversion rates

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

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

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

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

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

Customer experience and engagement

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Revenue stats

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

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

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

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

Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support: 

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

Response time

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

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

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

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

Live Chat vs. Chatbot

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

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

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

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

On the other hand:

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

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

The future of Live Chat

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

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

Further on, an interesting fact is that:

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

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

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

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

Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat

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

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

Ecommerce Customer Experience: how to optimize it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is eCommerce customer experience so important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What makes a good eCommerce customer experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – Personalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 – Flexibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 – Human connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 – Convenience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways to improve eCommerce customer experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live Blog for eCommerce

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

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

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

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

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

Live Group Chat for eCommerce

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

Live Chat Groups are an amazing option to achieve that!

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

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

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

The advantages of Live Chat Groups are:

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

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

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

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

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

Which one is best for your business?

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Knowing the difference between Live Chats and chatbots can help you figure out how to benefit from the several utilities of using both tools.

Many professionals work day after day to provide customers with the best digital channels for support and general communication.

Gartner predicts that 85% of customer relations will be managed without human interaction by the end of this year. This is a snappy consequence of customers’ expectations regarding how brands communicate with them in online environments.

Customers expect a response from companies they get in touch with, within an hour. However, it isn’t uncommon to find companies that still struggle to respond to consumers. Most terribly, some companies don’t reply to their customers at all.

In this context, solutions like Live Chats and chatbots have erupted to boost response times and optimize interactions. They grant companies ways to immediately reply to customers and get involved earlier in their buying lifecycle.

Have you ever wondered what the main differences between a Live Chat and a chatbot are? Many people have. That’s why we have written this article.

Here, you’ll understand the dynamics of Live Chat vs. chatbot, and figure out which is the best solution according to your goals.

Let’s get started!

What is Live Chat?

As the name suggests, a Live Chat is a tool that allows live interactions to happen between users alone or between users and brand representatives. Live Chats enable instant messaging and have a fantastic potential to become an exclusive place for customers to get real-time support. 

Rather than using their phones to call—and eventually hang on the line—, customers that use Live Chats have a more convenient way to talk to brands on their digital properties, whether they’re seeking help or simple information.

According to Zendesk, Live Chats have the second-highest customer satisfaction rate (85%), while talking on the phone remains the most top-performing live interaction (91%). See how small is the gap between them?

Live Chats are responding quite nicely to the need to optimize response times and increase customer satisfaction. Still, Live Chats don’t work solely for customer support. They are ideal to complement sales approaches as engines to increase purchases and conversion rates.

In case you’re curious to know more about this software, we have also listed 40 Live Chat benefits you need to know.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software application that simulates a conversation as if humans handle it. Also known as digital assistants, chatbots are often seen as a very promising tool for interaction between humans and machines.

These days, companies from distinctive sectors use chatbots for a huge purpose variety. Whether it is to enhance customer support, help users navigate on their websites, or collect leads’ information, these tools are excellent for transforming how companies communicate with their current and future customers.

Different chatbot usage is based on the fact these tools rely on artificial intelligence and can be programmed to reply to spoken or written messages. A sophisticated chatbot also uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to better address human language.

Because they are simple to use and are available 24/7, chatbots revolutionize customer interactions and fasten their pace. Sixty-nine percent of consumers prefer chatbots over other channels because they provide quicker responses to simple questions. By reaching out to a chatbot, customers save time—and, as you know, time matters.

For those reasons, the market can’t see itself in the future without chatbots. According to Grand View Research, the chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 globally. That’s a lot.

Prime factors of Live Chat vs. chatbot

Based on customers’ expectations, Live Chats and chatbots, three core-tasks must be:

  • Answering a question
  • Giving detailed explanations
  • Resolving a complaint

These are things both tools can do effectively. Still, as much as both Live Chats and chatbots serve the same purpose of optimizing response times and elevating customer interactions, there are a few differences that separate them.

Ahead in this post, you’ll find further details to understand how they differentiate.

1 – Scalability

Perhaps the most evident difference in the Live Chat vs. chatbot debate is that chatbots are much easier to scale.

When you implement a Live Chat, you must have people working behind the screen to reply instantly to customers. 

Depending on the conversation’s complexity level, sales reps might take longer to reply to more users activating a Live Chat. Recall that a Live Chat agent can answer to a limited number of interactions at a time as well.

Meanwhile, chatbots are programmed to handle multiple conversations simultaneously and reply faster, scaling conversations to employees when needed.

2 – Humanization

Statistics tell us 86% of customers believe there should be an escalate agent option when talking to a chatbot. 

That’s reasonable. You probably have gone through a more complex and specific customer issue that demanded human support, and chatbots aren’t able to solve any and everything—yet.

Your team might have to interfere and offer quality responses that are accurate to their needs for specific customers. This is something only Live Chat agents can utterly deliver. 

If you’re worried about Live Chat response times, here is an interesting statistic: 95% of customers agree to wait a little more to get a better quality service that matches their expectations.

Think about this for a minute: are your customers more likely to wait for human service or would they appreciate faster chatbot approaches?

3 – Acceptance

While people in the past seemed to dislike interacting with a robot, users these days appreciate having their issues resolved regardless of who is doing it.

Notice that 40% of customers don’t care whether they’re helped by a human agent on a Live Chat or by a chatbot. 

Plus, technology has advanced so much that some people don’t even know whether they’re talking to a real person or a very sophisticated chatbot.

4 – Availability

While chatbots work uninterruptedly, Live Chat agents are only available to respond during their working hours. 

This is a problem if you intend to make your brand available to users 24/7, especially if you consider the number of conversations that will occur if your customer engagement increases. 

You may have thousands of chats per month to reply to. How much human effort should it demand from you and your team?

On the other hand, Live Chats are most likely to make agents multitask more efficiently. Once they’re ready, Live Chat agents will identify more urgent conversations and route them to the right team, sharpening support time.

5 – Customer support

When customers get stuck in a product or checkout page, chatbots can quickly—and automatically—initiate a proactive interaction to help them out.

This is extremely important, as 73% of customers say what makes them love a brand is their ability to provide friendly and excellent customer service, especially when they need help before, while, or after the buying process.

Keep the information above in mind whatever the decision is you make. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a Live Chat or a chatbot to help consumers out. What truly matters is the support quality you’re providing them with, according to their preferences.

6 – Cost impacts

As much as implementing Live Chats and chatbots can make you take some money out of your pockets, the impact on costs is undeniable. 

You might spend to hire Live Chat agents, and training them should require some time. Just the same, implementing a chatbot isn’t free.

However, as response time-speeding tools, both Live Chats and chatbots retain customers’ attention and interest, going as far as converting website visitors into paying clients. This empowers your marketing and sales strategies and increases ROI. 

Live Chat increases conversion rates by 45%. For example, chatbots will save businesses more than $8 billion per year by 2022. They’re the best of both worlds.

Do you need to pick a side in the Live Chat vs. chatbot argument?

I’ll save you time and reply to this question right away: no, you don’t. 

The best thing about Live Chats and chatbots is that they don’t erase each other’s purpose and utility. Blending them might be a good option for many reasons.

Chatbots can work seamlessly along with Live Chat agents and notify your team when it’s time to step into the conversation with a lead or customer. Remember, chatbots are intelligent, automated mechanisms that scale and a good one should transfer a question it can’t answer to the right human agent.

While specific conversations require human support, many others can be handled by chatbots, and save your team time and effort so they can focus on more complex problems.

Let’s imagine a top-level customer has just entered your website. Your chatbot will tell your Live Chat agents right away, so they can reach out in a more personalized approach to answer their questions as conveniently and accordingly as possible. 

Live Chat vs. chatbot audience ownership

If you’re looking for solutions to keep your community on your page and take back your audience’s ownership, then interactive Live Chats should strongly be considered.

Beyond customer support and sales confines, Live Chats can be programmed to be a unique place where your customers can interact with other people in real-time conversations. Those are called Live Chat Groups.

By allowing instant conversations to take place in your Live Chat Group, you create a new sense of community that users can’t usually find anywhere else. 

This maximizes customer relationships and drives traffic to your website, making your brand less dependent on social media accounts and other external marketing channels.

Live Chat Groups are highly customizable and work on any website, making them an excellent tool to boost your customer engagement.

And there’s more: unlike standard Live Chat tools, Live Chat Groups are scalable and handle chatrooms with thousands of concurrent users simultaneously.

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Key takeaways in the Live Chat vs. chatbot matter

  • Chatbots reply faster as Live Chats depend on agents’ potential to reply
  • Live Chats are a better solution to deal with customers that prefer human interactions
  • Live Chats assure better quality responses to complex queries, while chatbots nail simple conversations
  • Chatbots scale, especially on peak hours; Live Chats don’t
  • Live Chat Groups are fresh, unique interactive tools that increase engagement and create a community sense, which neither chatbots nor typical Live Chats can

Many companies worldwide use both Live Chats and chatbots at the same time to handle different contexts and conversations and have amazing results from combining such powerful tools. Some of those results are better customer experience, and more authority is being perceived from their website pages.

Let users talk about your content

We have no doubt chatbots, and Live Chats are both needed in our context. Instant communication is an essential requirement, and the customers that don’t find the channels they expect to communicate with brands will get frustrated.

We have seen many (rational) hype around the Live Chat vs. chatbot matter, but think there is a problem: people aren’t talking about Live Chat Groups enough.

If you want a forward-thinking and customer-centric tool to increase your engagement and help your website be seen as the to-go place, it is time you have a Live Chat Group.

The cherry on top is that, besides being easy to implement, Live Chat Groups are also becoming crucial to make users spend more time on your website and give your brand more credibility.

To see how a Live Chat Group fits your website best, all you need to do is use Arena’s real-time engagement platform and have full control over your chat rooms.

You’ll start finding new engagement opportunities even before your competitors think about them. Get started for free!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why a real-time audience matters

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

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

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

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

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

How are companies using Live Blogs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology most giant reference: Apple Event Live Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Free access to political information: Debate Live Blog

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

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

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

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

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

The show went on: The Voice Live Blog

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

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

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

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

Live Original Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More ideas for your Live Blog strategy

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

Want to figure out how? Come along!

1. Launch products — and let people know immediately 

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

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

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

2. Add your own commentary to a conference 

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

3. Live blog during a crisis

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

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

4. Drive traffic to your Live Blog

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

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

5. Widen your audience

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

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

6. Feel more human to your readers

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

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

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7. Let users interact on your Live Blog

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

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

Your content strategy is incomplete without a Live Blog

But it doesn’t have to be.

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

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

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

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

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

Real-time Audience Live Blog to Connect and Engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why a real-time audience matters

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

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

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

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

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

How are companies using Live Blogs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology biggest reference: Apple Event Live Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Free access to political information: Debate Live Blog

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

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

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

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

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

The show went on: The Voice Live Blog

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

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

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

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

Live Original Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More ideas for your Live Blog strategy

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

Want to figure out how? Come along!

  • Launch products — and let people know immediately 

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

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

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

  • Add your commentary to a conference 

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

  • Live blog during a crisis

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

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

  • Drive traffic to your Live Blog

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

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

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

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

  • Feel more human to your readers

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

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

  • Let users interact on your Live Blog

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

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

Your content strategy is incomplete without a Live Blog

But it doesn’t have to be.

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

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

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

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

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

Liveblogging: a Successful Engagement Strategy

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

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

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

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

What is a Live Blog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Live Blog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Live Blog for your content strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A press conference to fight for: Fox Sports

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

Jambase: music any time, anywhere

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

Greenpeace: As it happened: #BarclaysShutdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 Ways to Boost Results with CDP

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From personalized advertising campaigns to attribution modeling, CDPs can help you extract the best out of your organization’s data

“Data is the new oil”, says the business cliché. No matter the sector your company operates, it certainly collects data from a number of sources – from unstructured qualitative data (from social media and call centers) to quantitative insights on paid campaign efforts and sales channels.

Marketing executives have increasingly more customer interactions to be aware of and are required to get a broad, deep picture of the audience’s needs and pain points.

A few years ago, it would have been enough just to have a DMP and CRM tool to manage customer data. They are still important today but hold limitations in capturing users’ journeys and profiles as standalone platforms.

A 2018 survey made by Forbes with 400 marketing leaders showed that most of them saw a gap in data management in their organizations, which is still true today. Only 19% reported having a robust set of analytics and technology tools to support customer-data-driven decisions. Besides, sometimes it can be challenging to make data accessible (and actionable) for marketing teams.

That is where customer data platforms come to play, with the purpose of connecting the dots between different data sources. Last year, the Gartner Institute pointed customer data platform as one of the four main emerging trends for marketers in 2020, along with blockchain, AI, and real-time marketing.

But what exactly is a CDP (Customer Data Platform)?

A Customer Data Platform is a software capable of unifying customer data from various sources, gathering quantitative and qualitative customer information across multiple touchpoints. It aggregates first, second and third-party data, as well as information collected from multiple channels, systems, and devices. 

If you lead marketing at a large company, you know how difficult it can be to connect user’s data, once the customer’s journey has become more complex with so many devices and channels available. 

With that in mind, we have prepared a list of 20 ways customer data platforms (CDPs) can improve your marketing strategy and results. 

1) Generating accurate customer profiles

CDPs can basically spot who your customers are – almost literally. They are able to filter all collected data through algorithms to determine unified customer profiles. In a single platform, It compiles identity, descriptive and behavioral data that can give you context on current customers and prospects, making it easier for marketers to build accurate personas. 

The type of data your team chooses to collect will vary according to your business and industry. If you work at a media company, for example, you’re probably more interested in customers’ preferred media channels than details about customer’s cars, information that would be crucial for car dealerships, on the other hand.

2) Accessing updates in real-time

Marketers know that customers’ preferences evolve over time, but most data management tools can’t always spot those changes. In CDPs, the processing of data happens in real-time, which makes it possible to spot changes in customer behavior in both the short and long-term. 

If a prospect stops using YouTube and migrates to Twitch, for instance, your team can quickly detect it and redirect campaigns.  

The long-term approach is also possible because CDPs can hold data for long periods of time, unlike data management platforms (DMPs), which usually hold data up to only 90 days (a cookie lifetime).

3) Avoiding data silos

Much of the data from an organization is generated and stored in different systems and departments, which makes it rarely accessible to other parts of the company. The result? A less collaborative corporate environment, less productivity, and less accurate customer profiles.

With CDPs, a great deal of a company’s data can be stored in a single, user-friendly interface. 

4) Giving marketers control over data management

For marketers, relying on other departments for reports and insights can be time-consuming and unproductive, since not everyone is on the same page about marketing needs. In that sense, CDPs also optimize the work of marketing professionals, because they can be managed by marketing teams instead of adjacent teams (like sales) or third-parties. 

Yes, CDPs should be useful to a variety of departments within a company, but every team can adapt their use according to specific goals while having access to all kinds of company data. That way, teams can also quickly scale marketing efforts and get new processes started in days, not months.

5) Understanding customers’ motivations

These days, brands don’t want to know just how a customer relates to their brand and category, but also what are his or her life aspirations and beliefs. Beyond customer profiles, CDPs can provide personality and behavioral data about customers, helping you understand their inner motivations as people, not just as customers. 

Almost like a social listening tool, you can find out the subjects they are discussing, topics they search for, preferences on content, politics, or products.

6) Connecting online and offline touchpoints

In a recent report, PWC found that the number of companies investing in omnichannel experiences has grown from 20% to more than 80% in recent years. While some marketers still struggle to be truly “omnichannel”, CDPs are able to track both online and offline customer data. 

A good CDP can combine information from various online and offline tracking applications, to get a full picture of where customers go, what products they search for, what they watch, read, or buy. A regular CRM tool, as a counterpoint, cannot pick up on offline data unless it’s manually setup.

7) Tracking interactions across different devices

Connecting interactions across multiple devices is also crucial for marketers who wish to provide seamless experiences to the audience. The CDP can connect interactions from a single person across different interfaces. 

The platform captures information such as time spent on the page, email and cookies used. If a customer accessed your page through different browsers at a desktop, and then accessed again through phone, a few days later,  you’ll know it. 

8) Optimizing targeted advertising campaigns

A CDP can automate the usually manual process of creating advertising audience clusters. From there, your team can use data to drive campaigns and promotions across multiple touchpoints, creating highly targeted, personalized advertising campaigns (CDPs can be integrated to Facebook pixels and Google Ads, for example).

Without a CDP, building these campaigns for complex audiences would take a lot more time and effort. The CDP lets you access clusters of customers and acknowledge what products they show interest in,  as well as their purchase intent and how likely they are to churn. 

9) Attracting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

A CDP is where Marketing, Sales Customer Experience and Customer Success meet. By centralizing information from these areas in a single platform, companies can optimize their marketing resources and efforts. If marketers can find out exactly where are the friction points in customers’ journeys, it’s more likely they will come up with the right messages and campaigns for every stage in the conversion funnel.

Ultimately, CDPs can support marketers in attracting more qualified leads. A study by Forbes shows that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customers’ needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients.

10) Reducing operational costs and improving ROI

As customer data platforms can be considerably automated, they bolster efficiency and reduce operational costs. After all, if you know exactly who your customers are and can streamline the targeting process, it’s likely you’ll impact the right customers at the right moment with the right formats.

As a result, you can optimize Costs per Click (CPC), Costs per Impression (CPM), and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

11) Tracking customer engagement (or disengagement)

In the myriad of data collected by CDPs, there are also quantitative and transactional data that reveal how your customer relates to your company. From buying history to abandoned carts, email click rates and responses, website visits, product views and social media engagement, your team can get a better sense of how’s the relationship between your audience and your company – and then manage it effectively.

12) Improving overall customer experience

A Walker study discovered that, by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the main brand differentiator among customers. When we talk about big companies and huge data sets, the lack of a CDP can actually result in poor customer experience.

Not integrating data results in friction along the customer journey, no wonder customers often complain about emails suggesting a product they just bought, or say they were impacted by wrongful ads and recommendations. Nowadays, people simply expect your company to know about their journey across different channels, and CDPs can help you a lot with that.

13) Boosting predictive marketing

Predicting customer behavior and preferences is what built companies like Amazon and Netflix. Predictive marketing is now becoming increasingly used by all sorts of businesses. This marketing technique, which determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies, is essentially fueled by data. 

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

14) Improving attribution models

With so many touchpoints with the audience, It is often difficult for companies to build a proper attribution model. According to Google, almost 80% of all transaction value involves at least two marketing channel interactions.

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.

15) Helping set realistic KPIs

By having a more holistic approach towards data, marketing teams can use CDP to measure and adjust expectations about key performance indicators (KPIs). You could even find out that your team is not tracking the right indicators, and choose new ones according to your strategy. 

However, when it comes to KPIs, CDPs must be used thoughtfully: more metrics possibilities don’t necessarily mean you’ll understand your customer better, so beware of the data that actually informs your strategy.

16) Complementing and optimizing existing marketing software

At the end of the day, marketers want more control over events in their channels, and so CDPs allow companies to deploy customers’ profiles to other marketing tools. Customer data platforms can be integrated to “delivery platforms” or “engagement platforms” to enable the planning of campaigns and messages.

CDPs can integrate your company’s email marketing or marketing automation software, website or social media platforms, and also live chat, CRM, analytics, and SMS tools. The amount of tools companies connect to their CDPs has to do, again, with the specifics of their business. Large businesses are likely to connect more tools than small companies.

17) Complying with data privacy regulations

One of the challenges marketers face is to balance personalization with data privacy, considering emerging privacy regulations worldwide. At first sight, it might look like a CDP could worsen privacy problems, since it tracks all sorts of data. From a practical standpoint though, a customer data platform can actually help companies comply with data privacy laws. 

To start, it collects mostly first-party data, which is key to data privacy. Second, it offers privacy configurations that can enforce your privacy policies. And third, a CDP acts as a single access point for data, which is safer than having multiple access points.

18) Experimenting with lower risks

CDPs are also a key engine for experimenting with emerging technologies and services. Imagine your marketing team wants to test an integrated campaign with a voice assistant for smart devices. While voice-activated marketing is still limited and won’t bring you scale, for now, it is seen as a prominent marketing channel for the future. 

By knowing your customers’ profiles, you can spot promising channels and formats and test them out with a small cohort of consumers. While combining insights to A/B tests, you might also come up with new business solutions and even ideas for revenue streams.

19) Feeding content strategy

In the age of Netflix and Spotify, customers expect personalized content that matches their particular moment in the customer journey. In that scenario, marketers have the challenge of being relevant and timely in their advertising efforts.

CDPs can help brands discover the formats of content and notifications that are more appealing to each customer, as well as when they tend to be more receptive to brands’ communication. 

20) Getting insights for products and services

If you once needed full customer research in order to understand customers’ unique needs, CDPs can give you hints about their preferences and needs. Because CDP gathers loads of qualitative information, it can also guide your product strategy.

By checking users’ feedback regularly, you can prioritize your product and service offerings to more closely match with customers’ needs. Or, you can identify trends and come up with completely new products.

Interested in a CDP for your company?

That is a lot of information about customer data platforms, right? It’s a lot to take in, so take a deep breath. Now, 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.

You might want to check out the specifics of Arena’s CDP, one of the most robust tools in the market. Register to this link to talk to one of our consultants and find out how our CDP can help your business.