3 Digital Marketing Tools to Engage Customers Better
Engaging customers is one of the most critical requirements for successful marketing. An engaged customer will be actually interested in your products & services, be open to receive marketing messages from you and even recommend your business to others. In other words, customer engagement fuels customer loyalty.
According to a recent marketing survey, 58% of marketers have reported that increase customer engagement was their number one priority. On the other hand, 44% marketers also stated that improving customer engagement was their number one challenge.
So how can marketers tackle this problem? Luckily, there are a few digital marketing tools that can help you get the job done
1. Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a feature-rich email marketing tool with a difference. It focuses heavily on email personalization and automation to help you provide a 1:1 experience to engage customers.
It comes with tons of out-of-the-box, mobile ready email templates that enable you to design professional-looking emails. It also allows you to integrate with third-party platforms like SalesForce and Shopify enabling you to easily pull customer information like name & address into your emails.
Companies like Virgin and Birchbox use Campaign Monitor to create personalized customer experiences using automated, pre-designed email workflows. These workflows (also called customer journeys) allow you to customize each email based on how the recipient has interacted with your previous emails.
You can also combine these workflows with dynamic content to automatically send different content to each customer segment, and dynamically determine which type of email you should send to each customer in future.
For example, when Adidas launches a new line of clothing in partnership with artists like Rita Ora and Pharrell, they use dynamic content to automatically personalize their emails based on demographics such as gender and age. This way their male subscribers receive information about the new Pharrell product line while females receive an email about new Rita Ora line.
Customer journeys can also be used to send subsequent emails, based on which product they engage within your email. For example, if a customer clicks on the Pharrell jacket, then they can be dynamically added to a segment which receives related product offer emails.
2. Optimizely
Optimizely is a tool that enables marketers to continually improve customer experience, by allowing them to A/B test different parts of their website to deliver the best user experience.
For example, it allows marketers to create different variations of landing pages on their own, with just a few clicks, without depending on a developer. Each variation is automatically displayed to a section of page visitors and their interactions are recorded, helping you identify which variation drives the most clicks.
Optimizely is a great tool to help you analyze the impact of any change on your website, without going through a full development cycle. This can include optimization of sign up page, checkout process, and even new website features.
In fact, with just 3 team members, the navigation company TomTom was able to boost their product page conversion rate by over 16%.
They were trying to find out if a single-click option would reduce some of the friction from their checkout process. So they created 2 variations – one with a vertical layout and another with horizontal layout.
In digital marketing, there’s no magic formula to increase customer engagement. The only way to know what you need to do to improve engagement rates is by testing different UX variations. That’s exactly what Optimizely allows you to do.
3. Olark
Olark is a live chat software that makes it easy for marketers to engage with their website visitors in real-time. Typically, live chat tools are used by customer support teams to resolve issues. However, it’s a great asset for every digital marketer.
Using tools like Olark, marketers can easily interact with their website visitors, ask them key questions that help you refine your marketing strategy. For example, in addition to answering their question, you can ask them what information are they looking for on your website, what they think about your products & services, how they perceive your business, where they came to know about it, and more.
Olark also allows you to integrate with third-party platforms like Salesforce, WordPress and Google Analytics that can provide more context to your live chat conversations and help you boost conversion rates.
Whole Design Studios, an eCommerce marketing, was able to analyze the qualitative data in their live chat transcripts to come up with a vocabulary of customer words. They used this data to optimize their website and landing page copy and saw a 17.6% increase in conversion rate.
Wrapping up
These digital marketing tools provide a great way to engage your customers better. Use Olark to learn more about your target audience, then use the information to optimize your web copy with Optimizely and identify the best converting content, and finally use Campaign Monitor to regularly send interesting and relevant information to your subscribers. The key is to clearly understand your target audience, what information they’re looking for and provide it through your website and landing pages.
Author Bio: For more than 8 years, Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises. He also runs the Fedingo Blog which covers a wide range of marketing topics
Some of the link on this post may have affiliate links attached. Read the FTC Disclaimer.