Guest post by JT Ripton
Connecting with your customers is critical.
No matter how good your products, no matter how much hype you generate at launch, a failure to engage with your target demographic can be devastating. Research undertaken by Gallup revealed that in the consumer electronics market, fully-engaged prospects visit their retailers of choice 44% more often each year than disengaged buyers. During these visits, they will actually spend more than they plan to.
Launching a startup today is incredibly challenging, given the fierce competition in the online marketplace, but actually achieving consistent success is something of an endurance test.
Satisfying customers, and retaining their loyalty, is key, but how do you keep them engaged?
Building consumer engagement requires research, hard work, and perhaps most importantly, the right tools. Here are five of the best available today.
1. Nimble
To keep users engaged, businesses must foster relationships through every available channel. Social media, email marketing, blog posts, news updates, and more are all crucial to a solid bond, but staying up to date is a time-consuming task.
Unless you’re using the right tools.
Nimble is a CRM tool designed to help companies focus on faster, more meaningful communication by merging various accounts, such as email, calendars, social channels, Google Apps, and more.
By having all the user-data you need in one place, you can access contacts’ updated information without the hassle of scouring multiple apps. Less time spent tracking down vital data equates to more productivity.
2. Spot.IM
Social networks have become essential to businesses in every sector, driving traffic to websites while enabling direct communication with existing and potential customers. However, as powerful as this is, it means these connections take place outside of your site, which should be your main online presence.
Spot.IM is looking to change that. This onsite social outlet is designed to provide visitors to your website with a fun, vibrant social experience they may not expect. The tool grants the freedom and power to enable real-time chats, post live blogs (for real-time coverage of events or company updates), personalized content feeds, and more.
By using this tool to communicate with your customers, you get to create more of a transparent, interactive image than a business with no direct on-site engagement. B2C sites can easily become little more than ads or signposts for a company, rather than an organic hub. Spot.IM may just rectify that.
3. Agora.io
Live video chat is a powerful communication tool for businesses. While text-based live chat is a common feature on thousands of sites, companies can still get ahead of the curve by integrating video chat into their customer-care services.
Agora.io is a cutting-edge software development kit enabling high-performance video communications, without the lagging or dips in quality other platforms suffer. Agora.io utilizes a network of 80 data centers across the globe, which identifies the strongest connections to accommodate users in any location.
Integrating Agora.io into your apps ensures crisp, clear interaction with your users, no matter where they may be based. Not only is face-to-face, real-time communication a faster, more convenient alternative to text-based conversations, it also engages customers at a more personal level.
Why? Your business will have a human face, rather than being just another faceless brand. Your customer-service team will also be more productive and get through more calls in less time, without having to read or compose messages.
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4. Hubspot
As one of the most well-known names on this list, Hubspot has built a solid reputation for encouraging customer-engagement.
This inbound marketing tool features CRM, sales, and marketing software to help even the smallest startup expand into a powerful brand. You can manage various email accounts and schedule meetings all in one place, minimizing time spent switching between apps while maximizing productivity.
In-depth analytics data enables you to track content, assessing which have been most successful, to improve customer-engagement in the future. Marketing is also centralized, making blogs, landing pages, email campaigns, and more easy to manage.
5. Bounce Exchange
Bounce rates may well tell you which pages on your site are least popular, but Bounce Exchange is designed to actually help you interact with users before they abandon you.
This behavioral marketing tool oversees customers’ activities and engages them as they attempt to leave a site, presenting a bespoke overlay offering an incentive to remain. Considering that a lack of engagement has already lead users to move toward that dreaded ‘back’ button, Bounce Exchange is a final attempt to keep them on your domain.
As a result, you may be able to give potential customers a flavor of what they will miss if they leave, and secure higher conversions.
Over time, these tools can help you engage with more users, nurture more meaningful customer relationships, and secure greater brand-loyalty. With new businesses entering and departing every sector on a regular basis, you have to invest time and resources into establishing yourself as a high-value, high-quality brand that genuinely wants to connect with its consumers.
Have you considered integrating customer-engagement tools into your daily activities, and if so, which do you feel most drawn to?
This article was originally written on November 28, 2016 and updated on April 4, 2019.
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