Are you often desperate about working all day long and not being sufficiently rewarded? Do you burn the midnight oil and think you get less than you deserve? If your answer is “yes”, than let’s dive in and see how this article can help you through. The problem many businesses encounter at the beginning of their route is failing to organize their marketing campaigns along with implementing other organizational tasks. To put it in other words, you may have a properly launched website with nice design and offer your audience high-quality services or goods but if you fail to apply marketing strategies, foresee and keep up with the upcoming marketing trends, your business will hardly have any chances to reach out to large audiences. There can be numerous marketing strategies, you can even get confused at the diversity of options and tools, but it’s up to you to choose the ones that suit your current situation and marketing goals. Here are some hacks that I consider indispensable for any online business growth and additionally, they can ensure the productivity of your work.
1. Providing Engaging Customer Support Services
Implementation of high-quality customer support services is essential for any business both on the online plane and in real life. I myself pay great attention to the way they serve me when I enter any of the traditional shops. When they smile and say how they can help me, I am already inclined to buy from them. And when they really try to help me showing something, bringing other options, offering discounts or taking something from the top of their shelves and unpacking to show additional functions, I just feel somehow obliged to buy from them. On the contrary, some sellers just keep following you at the shop as if you were a thief. In such cases, I just end up leaving the shop. Surely, this is a human nature and the same is true for the majority of cases and everywhere, including on the online platform. Providing engaging customer support services is crucial to keep your clients satisfied and increases the possibility for them to become loyal customers. So, here are several key ideas to fulfil your customer support strategic steps.
- Set up a ”Live chat” service
There are a number of ”Live chat” service providers. Both email marketing tools and customer service providers have “Live chat” services. Of course, these services sell at different prices, so no matter which one you choose, you should know how to use them more efficiently. If used properly, ”Live chat” can be very effective and useful. Thus, according to research, businesses that use ”Live chat” service have about 15% more revenue, than those who don’t use it. Moreover, ”Live chat” agents can replace 15 employees engaged in customer support, so this gives financial advantages to employers. In their turn, ”Live chat” agents should have the necessary background and communication skills to keep up the conversation by asking open-ended questions to the potential clients. They should ask mildly and politely if clients need any help and offer assistance just once, otherwise your potential clients may close the window and never come back again. If they start asking questions about an item, you should know that from now on the better your agent serves people, the more clients and later on loyal customers you can have. Accordingly, your agent should master the whole information about the items or services sold on your website so that he or she can answer all the questions the buyers may have, offer coupons or relevant options at discounted prices.
By the way, “Live chat” services have analytic tools that help you to track potential clients’ activity and the time spent on your pages, including the number of chats refused or accepted by the page visitors, to follow the overall productivity of your agents’ work, namely, the number of logins, the time they spend serving people, the number of missed chats and other necessary data. Additionally, you can also track the “Live chat” service provided by your company according to departments. Afterwards, you can get daily, weekly, monthly reports and see how things are going on with your service and what reviews you have received.
- Value your clients’ reviews about your service
Just like mobile network operators usually do after every call, it is especially important to ask your clients or customers how they will rate your service. Certainly, people are touched when they think their opinion may be considered or they can find solutions to their problems and concerns. Consequently, reviews are very important for clients to express their thoughts and for sellers to find out what they can improve. So, “Live chat” isn’t an exception. After each conversation, page visitants are given an opportunity to rate the service and you receive a chance to see the shortcomings in your support. However, rating with stars is surely not enough. It is indispensable to know why your service was rated as good and not excellent. With this aim, “Live Chat” services provide your website visitors with space where they can write down their concerns. As mentioned above, you can later on receive your ratings in reports. And if you receive а majority of 5-star ratings, why not show it off to your audience. Many services have a functionality through which you can show your success in customer support to your audience. For example, one of the “Live Chat” services has a regular plan which gives their customers a chance to be granted with Quality Badge, in case they receive enough chat satisfaction (that is 70%) and enough (that is 10 during the recent month) a number of ratings.
Of course, you can choose any provider according to your preferences and your pocket, but before you do, I would like you to know that many service providers offer live chat on their websites where they are ready to answer any questions you may have about this tool.
- Relieve your clients’ concerns about the security of their data
Would you tell your secrets to someone you don’t trust? As to me, I am more likely to provide information in case I know this won’t be shared or sold. As we know, information like emails, phone numbers, interests provided to websites are saved on cookies which is a kind of a message given to the web browser by the web server. Then, this information may be used to identify and track the activity and interests of Internet users. As a web server doesn’t have memory, your browser sends the information on a cookie to the server so as to identify you and customize the website according to your interests. However, Internet users need to know that the personal info provided by them won’t be sold to third parties, as it is done in case of malicious cookies. The latter may be sold to marketing companies who later on will know your name, email and your interests and send you ads you wouldn’t like to receive.
- Make your website mobile-friendly
Did you know that in 2015 more searches were made by mobile-devices than computers in some countries? Here is Google’s statement to prove this “More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
Another research shows that 27% of all the interviewed Internet users use Smartphones only and 14% of them use computers as their only source. As it is accepted to say, “Numbers speak of themselves”.
2. Applying Successful Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing is an important and perhaps the most widely used component of Internet marketing. Actually, if used properly, it can increase your conversions and sales, raise the authority of your brand or services. There are a number of tricks you should use to make your email marketing engaging and efficient. So, here are some key steps to help you achieve this:
Firstly, you should try to get many subscribers interested in your product. For this purpose, you should use different techniques in order to engage your website visitors and offer something as an incentive for subscribing. For example, many websites have a separate page of resources so when you enter the page they offer you guides, tests or participation in their seminars or webinars. As to me, I like guides and always subscribe to receive them. People are also very fond of tests as it is very inspiring to test your knowledge and get good results. There is also a tendency to offer podcasts on your website in case of subscription or send them to your existing subscribers. The previous day I received free podcasts and was very happy. Podcasts are audio files, so you can listen to them while doing something else. I made the shortcut of my email to show you:
Later on, the author of the email also offers “how to” links and videos on downloading the episodes to different types of devices. By the way, the subject line of the email was also engaging, it said “Narine, do you listen to podcasts”? which arose my interest in the offer so I opened it.
Apart from presenting the learning materials on the resources page or offering them through the email, you can also offer news updates, books, guides, podcasts etc. to your website visitants through a special subscription pop-up. Depending on the settings you have placed, the popup appears either while the visitor is scrolling down your website, is looking for something on different pages of your site or when he or she moves the mouse and is about to exit. This popup window offers visitors something they would like to receive in case they subscribe writing down their emails. Later on, it is necessary to collect all of the emails in one database. There are a number of email marketing services that provide this function of automatization along with other marketing functionalities at different prices. I myself use the MailChimp service as I can also connect it to my subscription popup using the MailChimp Popup Extension and thus making it easy for me to grab the emails and for my users to subscribe to my updates right from the popup. Surely, this kind of automatization will save much time and energy and accordingly, increases the productivity of my work.
After grabbing your potential clients’ emails, try to send them engaging offers. Of course, offering discounts is one of the most effective ways “to make” your audience convert. Offer them discounts at special events, such as birthdays, the Mother’s day, New Year, Christmas, you can even research International days, like International Children’s Day and make special offers on these days. It is also a widely-used marketing strategy to offer discounts at first orders. You can also make use of psychological triggers like creating a sense of reciprocity (we spoke about it above) and urgency. You can set deadlines for the discounts. For example, you can place a beautiful countdown pop-up to let your users know that the date for the discounts is expiring.
3. Leverage the exit-intent technology
In the recent years, the exit-intent technology has become more and more popular. It is a popup window which appears at the time when the website visitor moves his or her mouse to leave the website. Well, how is this done? Programmers use a Javascript mouse-leave event code to detect the case. So, detecting your intention and placing exit-intent popup events on their web pages somehow gives website owners another chance to make their website visitors stay on the site and make a conversion. For instance, after seeing the popup the user may agree to subscribe to the mailing list or to pay for discounted options. Or else, you can also redirect your website visitor to another page of your website as in this case they may be interested in the content and agree to stay.
There may be different reasons your visitor wants to leave your website, but the fact is that 15% of those who are about to leave return to the website after seeing the offer enclosed in the popup. For example, the website visitor may have found the prices on your online store a bit expensive and is about to leave your website, but when he is offered a discount he changes his mind and decides to consider your offer as one of the possible options or why not, chooses to buy from you at once. So, if this type of popups can help you increase your conversions, why not take most out of them and increase your business productivity?
Finally, productivity is crucial in any business and there are a great number of tools and techniques out there that guide business owners to make their own work and the work of the staff more productive. Of course, there are a lot of strategies that you can search for in the Internet and apply in your online business. Additionally, you can also take “real-life” marketing examples and bring them to the online platform. Though every business has its specific features and you can’t often apply traditional marketing strategies online, there can be a lot of ideas to guide you through. Hope you found many practical ideas in this article as well.
Good Luck in your marketing endeavors 🙂