Ninety Percent of advertisers think affiliate programs are essential to their marketing strategy, and marketers extensively use affiliate marketing to promote their brands and products. However, though affiliate marketing is a huge and growing industry, not everyone succeeds.

There are some affiliate marketers playing in billions while some others struggle to earn even pennies from their affiliate links. So, where does the difference lie? What are those successful affiliate marketers doing differently?

Well, it’s their strategy. Using affiliate links is an art and a science; you must understand that. If you’re searching for that knowledge, you’re in the right place.

In this article, we tell you all about affiliate links and the best ways to use them.

What are Affiliate Links?

An affiliate link is a unique URL given as a referral to affiliates for tracking traffic movement from the affiliate website to the merchant website.

The link helps track the traffic and conversions generated by an affiliate, and based on those conversions, the affiliates are paid their commission.

These links also help affiliates track their performance and improve their strategies to bring more traffic through their affiliate links.

How to Use Affiliate Links?

Using your affiliate links depends on multiple factors, such as audience, demand, competition, product price, commissions, incentives, and sales cycles. You have to keep all these factors in mind when choosing products for affiliate marketing.

Once you have your affiliate link and affiliate dashboard, you can start using them to promote products. The use of the links totally depends on how you decide to promote an affiliate product. For instance, if you’re doing affiliate promotions through your blog, you can add your affiliate links in the text somewhere in the blog.

Whether you add these links as HTML codes or simply copy and paste the standard affiliate link — doesn’t matter. If you copy and paste the standard affiliate link or add the link as an HTML, you will get the same results.

What you are trying to do is show the metrics for clicks and sales your customers will view, and thereby, you view, analyze, and improve all of this by planning more effective affiliate link promotions.

9 Ways to Promote Affiliate Links

It’s not the affiliate links — but the ways you promote those links that get you the money. You need to effectively strategize the promotion of your affiliate links to get the most value from them in the form of sales and conversions. But how can you promote your affiliate links?

Well, here are nine effective ways to efficiently promote your affiliate links for the most benefit and profit.

Use Affiliate Links in Your Product Reviews and Tutorials

Product reviews are the best way to bring conversions because the audience you are gathering in such content has a purchase intent. So, you can write reviews of your affiliate products and add your affiliate links to those products.

Similarly, you can write tutorials to help your audience understand how a particular product works, and in that tutorial as well you can add links to your affiliate products. Such tutorials are mostly for driving traffic to your blog, but they may also bring sales and conversions.

You need to strategize how you write the reviews and tutorials to bring the most value out of them, and once you do, your affiliate links start paying you through active conversions and sales.

You can also create affiliate review videos to promote your affiliate products and links.

Create a Resource Page and Add Affiliate Links to It

A resource page or landing page is a webpage that has details of tools, apps, and products that you use. You can add the merchant tools, applications, software, and products for which you’re an affiliate and add your affiliate links to those products.

With every product on your resource page, also add a description of those products, tools, and apps so that your audience understands their use and is tempted to purchase the product, thereby giving you the benefit of sales and conversion.

Place Affiliate Banners on Your Website

Banners are visual, and they appeal to the audience, so there is a high chance that your visitors will click the affiliate banners. However, the placement of these banners on your website also matters. If you place the banners within the content, chances are the users will ignore them and find them disturbing as they read through your content.

Placing affiliate banners on the top of your web pages makes sense and brings more clicks. You can also place the banners on the sidebars and footers of the pages.

The fact is that the more prominently the banners are placed in clear and visible positions, the more clicks they will generate.

Add Affiliate Links to Your Newsletters

Newsletters are a great way to build relationships with your audiences. If you have people subscribing to your newsletters, you know that you already have traffic on your blog and that your content is valuable. So, rest assured people will read your newsletters.

Therefore it serves as a good channel to promote affiliate links. You also have to build trust through your newsletters. They must not look promotional. So, while you add affiliate links to email drip campaigns, you must also ensure that your content doesn’t look very promotional.

Building relationships and establishing trust are the prime objectives of newsletters and emails. Once you have your audience trusting you, you can start adding your affiliate links to your newsletters to get clicks and conversions on them.

Repurpose Your Content for Videos and Add Affiliate Links to Them

Eighty-seven percent of marketers say that publishing videos have increased their website traffic. So, adding video content to your website is highly beneficial not only for affiliate link promotion but for building a strong base for your website and engaging your audience as well.

You can add affiliate links to this video content by simply mentioning the link in your video as well as in the description. Since your video is engaging, you will automatically get clicks on your affiliate links through it.

Leverage Social Media and Forums to Promote Your Affiliate Links

Social media and forums are popular channels where most of your target audience is active, and you can target them to buy your affiliate products through these channels. However, to leverage this, you need to have a good online presence. Once you’ve created that online presence, you can promote your affiliate links.

You can add affiliate links to your social media bio and descriptions and also create posts promoting those affiliate links. As you promote your affiliate links on your social media channels, you can track that the clicks grow, and you make more profits through conversions.

However, as you do this, you need to be quite careful, as often the audience gets annoyed by promotional posts. So, you must keep the quantity of such posts and link promotions to a minimum.

Additionally, on forums like Quora and Reddit, you cannot directly promote your affiliate links. So, you need to adhere to the guidelines of the forums to promote your affiliate links through social media and forums. Take time to read and understand the forum guidelines.

Add Affiliate Links to the Posts You Publish on Platforms Like Medium

As a blogger, it’s natural for you to publish posts on content publishing platforms like Medium. Such platforms allow you to do link promotions in your posts directly. So, you can add your affiliate links to your posts on such content publishing platforms.

You need to maintain the quality of your posts. The readers do not wish to read too promotional posts, and stuffing too many links is not a good strategy as it will not bring any traffic to your platform. Suppose you post only a single affiliate link at the end of your article, which also happens to give value to the audience. In that case, chances are you’ll get many clicks, and your affiliate conversions will shoot up, thereby getting you more profits.

Add Your Affiliate Links to Your Own Products

As marketers, you must have your own products, such as ebooks, digital courses, etc. So, it helps to add affiliate links to these products of your own. Your audience already trusts your products and will also trust the affiliate products that you market in your products.

Again don’t be too promotional. The strategy must be naturally adding affiliate links to your products in relevant places so that the links don’t look as if they are deliberately stuffed.

Once you learn to add affiliate links to your products naturally, you’ll see that your affiliate sales will rise along with the sales of your product.

Run Pay Per Click Ads

Running ads is also a great way to promote your affiliate links and get clicks on them. This is the most direct way to promote your affiliate links and will bring the most conversions. You only need to strategize your ad campaign based on your commissions and other factors.

Are You Ready to Earn More Through Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money. You only need to know the right strategies to promote your affiliate links. We hope the strategies we shared in this article will help you out, and you will be able to generate huge profits through affiliate marketing.

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

The post Best Ways to Use Affiliate Links for Business appeared first on ReadWrite.

Companies can reduce customer churn by 67% if they succeed in solving customer issues during first-time interactions. This is what makes first-call resolution such an important factor for every organization. But what is the first call resolution? What factors influence first-call resolution? How can you ensure a good first-call resolution rate?

If you’re seeking answers to all these questions, you’re in the right place. Throughout this article, we have explained everything encompassing first-call resolution. So, have a read of this article and understand everything you need to know about first-call resolution.

What is First Call Resolution?

First Call Resolution, as the term itself explains it, is the ability of a call center to solve customer issues, problems, queries, or requests in the first call itself without any need for a follow-up.

This is an important metric for call centers because it determines the call center executive’s ability to efficiently help the customers while also helping deliver customer satisfaction and garnering customer loyalty. In fact, good customer service is one of the primary factors in building customer trust and loyalty for a company. So, you need to maintain a good level of first-call resolution to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How to Calculate First Call Resolution?

First Call Resolution is an important metric focused upon by call centers because it determines the level of customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as the efficiency of employees.

There’s a simple formula to calculate this metric.

First Call Resolution = (Number of Cases Resolved in the First Call / Total Number of Cases) *100

So, for instance, if you have 100 cases in total and your executive resolved 60 of them in the first call, your first call resolution rate would be 60%.

What is the Importance of First Call Resolution

Given the level of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty that first-call resolution drives, one can clearly understand how essential it is for any organization to maintain a good first-call resolution rate.

Hereinbelow are some more points that detail the importance of first call resolution.

1. Track Agent Performance

First-call resolution shows how efficient your agents are in resolving customer queries at the first instance without the need for a follow-up. The higher these numbers, the better your agents’ performance.

So, by keeping a check on first call resolution, you can constantly keep a check on your agents’ performance and take actions to improve the same as well, because evidently, 54% of the customers globally feel that customer services in organizations require improvements.

2. Provides Better Sales Opportunities

When customers are satisfied with your company, they tend to purchase more from your company. Statistics reveal that good first-call resolution improves cross-selling rate by 20%.

So, you get better sales opportunities which in turn increases business profits.

3. Improves Net Promoter Score

When the customers like your services and are satisfied with the way you solve their problems quickly and expeditiously, they are more likely to recommend your organization to other people they know.

As per research, a customer experience promoter has a lifetime value to a company that is 600 to 1400% more than the lifetime value of a detractor.

So, you get an increase in the lifetime value of the promoters, and that works great to increase your business profits.

4. Provides Agent Satisfaction

Just like customers don’t like coming back call after call for the resolution of their issues, call center agents like it no better to deal with the same customers repeatedly. The faster they are able to solve customer issues, the happier they are, as their performance is measured as efficient, and they also get perks at their job. So, good first-call resolution also promotes higher agent satisfaction which creates a positive work environment.

5. Reduce Customer Churn

85% of customer churn is caused due to poor service that could have been easily avoided. One way to avoid customer churn is to increase the first call resolution rate. When customers have a good experience with customer service, they tend to like the service and would want to come back, which garners customer loyalty and reduces customer churn.

What are the Factors Influencing First Call Resolution?

First Call Resolution is an essential metric, and you need to reach at least the standard percentage for that metric. However, what influences your first call resolution rate? It’s essential to know these factors so that you can work on improving the first call resolution rate for your organization.

Hereinbelow are nine factors that essentially influence your first call resolution rate.

1. Work Environment Complexity

The work environment greatly influences an employee’s work in the organization. So, the more complex the work environment, the more difficult it is to maintain a good first-call resolution rate. These complexities include the level of authority, company policies and procedures, red tape, etc. It’s essential to keep things simple to attain a good first-call resolution rate.

2. Team’s Role in First Call Resolution

The team and agent knowledge role matters in first-call resolution. The better the team and agent support one another, the higher the first call resolution rate. It’s essential that the team and agent both understand the company policies, procedures, etc. and also have knowledge about the latest promotions, offers, etc., to efficiently answer the customers and solve their queries.

3. Multiple Channels

The channels being offered to customers for getting customer service and support also matter for first-call resolution. There are multiple channels depending on what channel the customers use to access the support.

If the customers use live chat support, it’s easier and faster to resolve their queries and questions.

However, if they use ticket systems, it may take some time to answer them, and there may be an exchange of a few emails as well. Here are a few examples of how to respond to support tickets so you can cut down on the number of emails it takes to find the root of the customer’s problem.

So, first-call resolution highly depends on the use of channels as well.

4. Lack of Authority to Solve Problem

The authority of an agent to solve the customer problem also influences first-call resolution to a huge extent. For instance, if a customer is asking for a refund, however, the agent lacks the authority to grant the refund, and there is no way that the agent will be able to resolve the call in the first instance. There will have to be a follow-up call with a person who has the relevant authority.

So, authority matters a lot when it comes to first-call resolution, and the lack of same affects the first-call resolution rate negatively.

5. Agent Communication Style and Skill

The way the agent communicates with the customers also influences the first call resolution rate. The agent must know how to impress the customers and must always talk in a positive tone that makes the customer feel like the agent is on their side and working efficiently to solve their problems.

Sometimes, it’s mere communication skills that solve all customer queries, and you’re able to close the call at the first instance.

6. Level of Training of Reps

Training is essential to build communication skills and impart the agents with the necessary knowledge about delivering support to the customers. When the agents are trained well, it reflects in their calls, and they are able to increase the first call resolution rate.

7. Level of Training Imparted to Agents

How well the agents are trained for the calls influences their first call resolution. The agents who are trained well and are imparted practice before they can go live are more equipped and skilled to solve customer queries in the first call than those who are not trained well and are not given enough practice before putting them on actual calls.

8. Level of Authority to Solve the Problem

Authority to solve a problem greatly influences the first call resolution rate. It’s essential that the agents have the required authority to solve customer queries, concerns, and requests instantly rather than waiting for their superior authority to authorize them for action.

9. Company Policies & Procedures

The policies and procedures of a company also influence first-call resolution. If the company has stringent policies and a lot of red tape, it’s likely to have a lower first-call resolution rate. So, it’s essential for a company to maintain flexible policies and procedures so that agents are able to play by the rule book while also efficiently resolving their customer queries and questions.

Best Practices to Improve First Call Resolution Rate

There are multiple factors that influence the first call resolution rate. Based on those factors, there are also practices that can improve your first call resolution rate.

Here are all such practices explained in detail for your understanding.

1. Observe the Complete Picture

You must look at the entire customer journey as they approach the support. While it may be their first call, their requests may be second or even third because they might probably have tried finding solutions through your self-service resources.

If that is the case, resolving the problem in the first call becomes more important because the customer has already become quite frustrated with the self-service resources not working.

When you look at that customer journey, you get an idea about how much effort you need to put into call resolution, and you handle the call accordingly with your full efficiency.

2. Find Common Issues for Delayed Resolution

Sometimes, some calls are resolved late due to the same issues at the end of customer service agents. It could be a lack of authority, lack of training, policies and procedures, or anything else. It’s best to identify such common issues for delayed resolution and work on them so that such common problems no longer remain the reason for calls not being resolved.

3. Leverage Interaction Analytics

All the customer call interactions are recorded, and you can use those records for data interpretation and analytics purposes. Leverage all the analytics that you can. You can see which calls went well and which calls need improvement, and based on the analytics, you can design further training programs for your agents while also creating resources for commonly asked questions and using good interactions as examples for training the employees.

4. Measure FCR Performance

Constantly measure the first call resolution performance. Measuring the performance will give you an idea about where you stand, and you can take steps for improvement based on the performance measurement reports so that good performance can be made best and bad performance can be analyzed. You can take steps to improve the same.

5. Effectively Respond and React to Customers

Responding to customers efficiently, effectively, and quickly is the key to maintaining a good first-call resolution rate. Take the calls confidently, understand customer queries and respond effectively to the customers, ensuring that their issues are truly resolved.

6. Create follow-up Surveys

Asking the customers for their feedback on the call will help you know and understand how good and efficient you are in solving customer queries. Create follow-up surveys to be shared with the customers for their feedback and make it a point to ask the customers to fill up those surveys so that you can get ratings for your calls and you can use the insights from the customers to improve your first call resolution rate.

7. Observe the Complete Customer Journey

You must always look at the complete picture. You must know what your customer has gone through before finally reaching out to you. While it may be their first call, it’s possible that they have tried reaching out to you before or that they have tried your resources but didn’t get a satisfactory solution.

When you look at the complete customer journey, you understand their experience so far and can work on providing them with the solutions that actually work for them.

Platforms that Help in Providing Better Support to Customers

First-call resolution is essential to every organization, and you don’t want to leave any stone unturned to improve that metric. The best way to ensure good customer support is to use the best customer support software that helps provide great customer support.

Here are some of the platforms that you can use.

1. Custify.com

Custify is a customer success software for SaaS which allows you to reduce customer churn and grow your revenues by enhancing your sales.

You can easily identify customer behavior and patterns which further help identify the opportunities for sales and help grow revenue. The platform is also great for integrating your other tools. You get predictive analytics and insights into customer behavior and employee performance, which further helps you build strategies for the future.

• Pricing: Custom

You can contact them to get a custom quote for the software.

2. Zonkafeedback.com

Zonka Feedback is a customer support tool that allows you to create exciting and engaging customer surveys and feedback forms so that you can get insights into what your customers have experienced from your services.

Based on that feedback, you can improve your services and launch new products that meet customer needs.

Additionally, you can create workflows to better manage your operations and track the performance of your agents.

Pricing

Personal

• Essential – $24/month
• Starter – $44/month

Business

• Professional – $79/month
• Growth – $169/month
• Enterprise – $429/month
• Custom

3. Podium.com

Podium is a customer service management tool that helps you connect with your customers and build better relationships with them. Besides that, it also has different tools integrated into it that help manage workflows and ensure business growth and revenue.

Pricing

• Essential – $289/month
• Standard – $449/month
• Professional – $649/month

Are You Ready to Improve Your First Call Resolution?

So, that was all about first-call resolution, and it’s clear that it is a very essential metric for your organization’s performance, especially when it comes to keeping up customer trust and loyalty. While there are many factors that influence it, there are many ways to manage those factors and improve your first call resolution rate.

We hope this article was helpful and gave you a complete understanding of first-call resolution for you to work on constantly improving the same.

The post 9 Factors Influencing First Call Resolution appeared first on ReadWrite.

It’s customary to have questions in mind before releasing a new product. For example, we often wonder how the market will respond to our products. Would customers like it? But what if you had a tool that would make it easier for you to get answers to such questions?

Sounds impressive, right? 

An in-depth analysis of your past, present, and potential customers can help you find insights that can help you enhance your product or develop more potent marketing messages.

New brands and features are constantly being brought to the market to entice buyers. Sometimes we assume that we have a good understanding of our consumer base, but with each new product that enters the market, the expectations alter.

With the aid of market research software tools, you can quickly identify your target customer base and locate new ones. 29% of small firms use these technologies to understand customer needs better.

There are now many online tools available for market research, many of which are free or provide free and paid access. Although not all-inclusive, we’ve compiled a list of 5 excellent platforms that disseminate market data, insight, and information.

What is a market research tool?

Market research is the procedure of obtaining and examining data about your clients, both existing and potential, to enhance your corporate strategy. It helps comprehend the information and decode how to expand the business with confidence. In addition, you can use the tools to test product or service concepts, improve marketing efforts, and more.

B2B market research tools assist in lowering the risk of business decisions. A decent research tool should analyze the data as well as collect it. Would it be helpful to know the chances that your product would be successful? 

Think Market Trends, Market Finder, and other marketing research tools provide intriguing insights on whether people are looking for your product, which markets to target for launch, and which retail categories are growing as the months and seasons go by. Because before making a purchase, 81% of customers research the platform’s goods and services online.

The ‘Find My Audience’ feature in the market research software tool enables you to research what your potential customers are passionate about and what you should cover in your brand’s marketing campaigns if you’d want to advertise your goods using social media.

It should give the knowledge needed to support market theories and make better decisions. You should be able to optimize sales strategies, marketing, etc., thanks to the insights!

The market categories where your goods or services are most likely to sell are revealed by research tools. For example, you may determine your target market by analyzing client feedback to find out where the need for your product arises.

How can market research tools help you?

Consumer rejoices over their good fortune when they view an advertisement for a product that seems ideal for them, although this situation probably wasn’t (and shouldn’t have been) a matter of chance. Companies use strategic market research to make these situations conceivable. 

A recent report by First Research Inc. estimates that market research tools contribute to $45 billion in annual global income. With proper knowledge about its target market, a business may produce products and design marketing initiatives directly speaking to consumers. But, the advantages don’t end there!

It is simply upon an intelligent business to ascertain a product’s potential for success after the initial glimmer of curiosity. You can do market research to find out if an opportunity exists, how to position a product or service, or what customers think once it has been released.

Start by exploring market research by utilizing these market research tools for startups and resources if you’re aware of the significant consequences of failure. Then, before a new launch, gathering data and opinions may help you increase success rates.

Organizations have learned some of the most significant industry revelations and the minor facts that most people miss, thanks to market research. 

69% of startups estimated that they could target more customer base after using market research tools. Market research is crucial because it enables businesses to interpret information and make defensible judgments.

The following strategies of marketing research tools will help you attract potential clients and keep them hooked with a sustainable retention rate:

•  Customer-centric approach:

Understanding your customer base better is the primary goal of a market research tool, which is a crucial step in developing a customer-focused company. Customer experience is always put first in customer-centric businesses. According to HubSpot, customer-focused companies are 60% more profitable. It is clear why putting the needs and wants of the client first will lead to success.

You can learn about your target clients’ requirements and preferences, as well as other critical factors, through market research. You cannot successfully establish a customer-centric firm without an understanding of your customers.

•  Reduce risk by testing:

Any business effort must include some elements of risk. Businesses would limit their opportunity for the benefit if they didn’t take risks. Successful companies, however, typically take proactive measures to reduce their risks. Avoiding risk does not include being still and doing nothing. Firms should use market research tools instead to minimize risks and increase benefits.

Making sure a product is in demand is crucial in reducing risks. Numerous items actually fail. Research Inc. states the failure rate could be as high as 95%. Even if that estimate is probably too high, it is nevertheless true that many new products miss their target market and wind up in clearance racks.

•  Informed decisions:

Companies invest in market research tools to make their decisions more data-driven. However, decisions should not be made based just on intuition. 

For instance, you might think it’s a smart business move to release a premium version of your product at a higher price point. But did you realize that consumers also associate expensive goods with premium labels? As a result, their trust may be lost if demands are not met. As a result, they might decide to leave you.

Conducting market research is the only way to be specific. However, to create your own survey and polls for an informed, fact-based decision, you can explore some inexpensive tools which are an alternative to Surveymonkey.

•  Stay on the top of trends:

Not only new enterprises should conduct market research. Businesses must adapt in order to improve client connections as consumers do. Keeping up with current trends can be accomplished with the help of market research. Secondary research is frequently used to study trends. Consumer interest in new product features can be discovered, for instance, through industry publications or research from your competitors.

Market research tools are crucial if you want to keep up with today’s rapid cultural changes. You must keep up with trends in various areas, including your target audience’s purchasing habits, the most effective advertising platforms, packaging preferences, product features, pertinent content, and much more.

•  Better connect with customers:

Regardless of your target, adopting a one-size-fits-all strategy for marketing channels can be an expensive error. The print magazines, television shows, and websites your audience frequents can be very different from those of the target market for your previous offering.

Making the proper marketing channel selections is a crucial first step in reaching your target audience. Still, to genuinely connect with them, you also need to customize the content of your marketing materials. Again, using the proper market research tool can allow you to excel at this.

5 Best Market Research Tools & Softwares for your Business

Market analysis tools increase your chances of long-term success significantly. You can only find the information you need to create a product or service that 

• meets the needs of your potential customers 
• distinguishes yourselves from the competition through market research.

You may learn a lot from each of these services, regardless of whether you work for a major corporation, a small business, or another type of organization. So here are the top 5 market analysis tools we’ve found and our recommendations for using them.

1. Usersnap

With the use of in-app screen captures, surveys, and feature request boards, Usersnap enables you to get additional product insights. Your one-stop tool for collecting consumer feedback.

Create unique feedback widgets and buttons to engage with your users. Provide feedback channels like a feature request form, screen recording with voice feedback, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) questionnaires, etc. Also, make user behavior and URLs the basis for feedback surveys with segmenting and targeting options. Console log failures and user environment information are automatically attached.

Features:

• You may assign, classify, and discuss issues and requests in one dashboard.
• Efficiently manage customer feedback to boost satisfaction.
• You may update the status of your tickets and receive community support for your product ideas. 
• With the reply-to-sender function, you may close the feedback loop.

Pros: 

• Enables you to launch and distribute testing pages to people
• Flexibility of usage and implementation
• Simple for customers to provide feedback from their point of view

Cons: 

• When it comes to enterprise solutions, the price is high for a self-service product.
• Lack of two-way integrations

Pricing: Starts from $19/ month.

2. Outgrow

Outgrow makes it simple for marketers to make calculators, suggestions, quizzes, and polls for better lead generation, qualification, and monetization. With Outgrow, marketers can quickly create these solutions without the assistance of a developer or designer.

Features: 

• Outgrow has a host of design templates that are fully optimized for mobile, desktop, and tablet.
• Easily embeddable into your advertising, websites, mobile apps, social media, SMS, and email communication. In addition,
• There are over 1000 pre-made content pieces and funnels that are optimized to improve conversion so you can change the questions, make a few tweaks
• It’s consistent with your brand and has your own interactive content ready in minutes.

Pros: 

• The quiz is fun, and site visitors are likelier to return more than once.
• Outgrow has been the ultimate tool allowing us to connect with a youthful audience through quizzes and calculators
• The platform is intuitive and easy to navigate; no coding experience is required. As a professional marketer with a tight budget,

Cons:

• The options to customize the design have some limitations
• Problematic to style if you aren’t on the top pricing plan, everything is an upcharge

Pricing: Starts from $25/ month.

3. HubSpot

With a wide variety of question types and a scalable framework, you may customize your survey to meet the demands of your organization.

Send your customized survey to your teams through a web link or email, and then quickly publish the results to strengthen customer interactions and increase customer retention.

Features:

• HubSpot will assist you with selecting the best feedback instrument and distribution mechanism, whether it be email, chat, or online link.
• To measure customer loyalty at each touchpoint, choose from pre-built Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) questionnaires.
• You can automate your customer care procedures with task creation, escalation, and ticket routing.

Pros:

• Using a global, collaborative inbox that compiles customer emails, chats, and other correspondence, manage 1-to-1 customer communications at scale.
• Convert your clients’ most commonly asked support questions and issues into a comprehensive, search engine-indexed knowledge store of how-to guides and manuals.
• Use bots to direct consumers to pertinent support content, the right chat agent, and more to increase the efficiency of live chat and grow 1-to-1 discussions.

Cons:

• The monthly cost of the Starter package is only $50. However, if your company is smaller or you’re simply on a restricted budget.
• HubSpot’s free edition has extremely few capabilities, so you can only use it for the bare minimum of tasks.

Pricing: Starts from $50/ month.

4. Woorise

Make attractive surveys that people want to take. Create the ideal survey and include several questions, reasoning, and personalized branding. Real-time, graphical findings are displayed. Increase response rates by interacting with customers on their chosen platforms and devices. Deliver your survey via a landing page, or copy the code and paste it into your emails or website. Any survey is fully responsive and performs well on every platform and device.

Features:

• Send emails by default as soon as a form is submitted. To send customized notifications based on user preferences, use conditional logic and merge tags.
• You may easily see our entire website, landing pages, and Woorise dashboard on any device because they are all mobile-responsively designed.

Pros:

• With a drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly alter any campaign component, including form fields and social media actions, without the assistance of a developer.
• Data from each participant is exported as a CSV file. Do You require more authority? For example, you can set optional filters and a date range to export only the required information.
• By breaking up complicated forms into separate steps, you can quickly and easily get more information from your prospects.

Cons:

• There is insufficient documentation.
• Can’t remove watermark in simple plans

Pricing: Starts from $29/ month

5. Zonka feedback

You may gather feedback from website visitors and evaluate their experience using link surveys, QR codes, and in-app surveys. Reach out to customers remotely to learn more about their experiences via email embedded surveys, email button surveys, and email signature surveys. By holding live polls, you can determine the preferences and viewpoints of the public. After the poll, show the audience the live results.

Features:

• Use quizzes to engage your viewers, test their knowledge, and establish rapport. At the end of the test, display the scoreboard and the solutions.
• Take feedback from customers on-site and gather leads using touchscreen devices without WiFi. Automatic syncing.
• Create Dynamic Surveys using survey white-labeling, themes, multilingual surveys, pre-fill data, variables, answer piping, and logic.

Pros:

• Use a straightforward NPS question to gauge customer loyalty.
• Follow the performance of the Customer Support Team.
• Ideal for transactions and post-service
• To reduce churn, lower customer effort

Cons:

• The inability to skip questions with irrelevant sections.
• When leaving feedback, the screen occasionally takes a long time to load the app or tab on the home screen.

Pricing: Starts from $96/ year.

Utilizing market research will ultimately provide you with a significant competitive advantage. Due to the benefits listed above and the fact that less than 40% of marketers employ consumer research as a decision-making tool, this is the case.

One of the most effective methods to use market research data is to optimize and educate your marketing strategy from campaign conception to execution.

The future of marketing research is already here

According to market research numbers and trends, many of these trends have been boiling below the surface for the past few years. As a result, you are now prepared to command attention. Understanding the primary market research trends will put you in an excellent position to support your brand with intelligent customer intelligence.

Tools for market research are a priceless resource for learning precisely what your target audience is thinking. Whether you conduct your research using free or expensive technologies, you can find a wealth of information that could completely change the course of your company.

Stop making snap judgments; take the time to learn about your target audience and utilize that knowledge to guide your marketing plan.

The post 5 Best Market Research Tools appeared first on ReadWrite.

Customer service is the cornerstone to building a successful business empire today. Your satisfied customers are your free marketing tools and revenue generators.

Satisfied customers are like ATM machines that you can use to drive instant sales. But taking your customers to a satisfaction point is a challenging task, especially in the online ecosystem.

A simple call or email support is insignificant today. That is because 54% of customers say they have higher customer service expectations today than before.

So, to meet the elevated customer expectations, you have to use advanced customer support software. That can help you transform customer experience with the latest technologies like AI, VR, and many more.

Now, in this tech-charged world, it is not easy to find the best customer service tools. Not because there are limited options. It is the exact opposite because there are so many different types and variations of customer service programs available that you might get confused.

Therefore, this post aims to help businesses find the best tools to elevate the customer experience in 2022. So, let’s dig in.

How Can Customer Support Software Benefit Your Business?

Do you know 83% of customers say they feel more loyal toward brands that respond and resolve their issues faster? That means satisfying your current customers can help you build a loyal customer base to churn constant revenue.

And for that, you need powerful tools for responding to customer queries and assigning tasks to relevant people for fast solutions. Besides this, customer support software can help to:

• Empower service agents

Your customer service agents will become more productive and engaged with the right tools. They can easily access the relevant information related to a customer for instant support. For example, if a customer has a query regarding their pending bills, the sales agent can quickly access your centralized accounting software and check payment details.

In addition, customer service tools help to build coordination among your team. Your staff can easily connect and resolve customer queries in real-time.

• Centralized database

Accurate customer data drives all the modern marketing strategies. For instance, you can not leverage account-based marketing unless you have real-time and authentic customer data in your hands.

And that’s where customer support tools come into action. The software can collect customer data from different resources to compress it into a platform like calls, social media, etc.

This information helps sales and marketing teams to create powerful strategies to provide a personalized experience to customers, leading to higher satisfaction.

• Offer a self-service option

Today, customers don’t like to wait for agents to pick up their calls and walk them through a series of calls before resolving queries. They want the fast and self-service option.

Customer support software allows companies to build a self-service platform for their customers. They can upload knowledge bases on their website, and customers can access it to find relevant information. Therefore, 70% of white-collared people interact with chatbots today.

• Scale your customer base

You can easily expand your customer base when you have the right tools in your hand. You can seamlessly manage customer data, handle their queries and provide instant solutions.

Manually, it is not possible to handle thousands of customer calls or emails at once. But, advanced tools can help you expand your customer base and win their trust.

• Easy to track performance

If you want to track the performance of your customer service team, old-fashioned spreadsheets will only provide you with certain information. It will not tell you which employee has resolved more queries in the last few days and how much time they took to resolve each complaint.

Only advanced customer support software will help you find inside information on your customer support team. Using the software, you can generate real-time performance reports to understand how your customer support department is working and what improvements they require.

• Works in remote and hybrid environments

Do you have a remote or hybrid customer support team? Then, it is a must for you to get customer support software to manage team operations, resolve customer problems and coordinate remotely.

Types of Customer Support Software

Automation is important for high-quality customer support. But, the next question is what type of customer support software is actually useful for your business.

Let’s explore popular customer service solution types to understand which one is suitable for you.

• Knowledge base solutions

Knowledge base software helps you provide the self-service option to your customers. It could be a simple website or web page that contains documents to answer customers’ common questions and is organized systematically.

You can create self-help guides, how-to tutorials, user manuals, FAQs, and other information for your customers.

• Live chat

Live chat solutions provide customers direct access to sales agents via chat. You can add a live chat feature on your website or app so that agents can resolve your customer queries in real-time. For resolving minor issues, live chat solutions are extremely helpful.

• Help Desk

Help desk customer support solutions help to manage customer emails rather than using inboxes like Gmail. The programs make it a lot easier to manage, tag, and organize large volumes of emails. You will never miss a customer email with help desk solutions.

• CRM

CRM, aka customer relationship management tools, lets you manage customer interactions and databases across different stages. You can record all information about your customers in sales CRM tools and anytime access to solve queries. CRMs are robust tools that customer service, sales, and marketing teams can use.

• Instant Messaging

Companies can embed instant messaging features on their websites or apps to facilitate customers to drop messages via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. It is a convenient way for customers to reach businesses.

• Social Media

Nowadays, businesses also need social media monitoring tools to analyze customer interaction on social media platforms. Some customers prefer social media inboxes to share their queries. Therefore, having a proper tool to monitor your customer interaction on social media is extremely important today.

• Customer Feedback Survey

Businesses should also get customer feedback survey software to regularly stay in touch with customers and know what they are thinking. Before launching a new product or service, customer feedback data will provide you insight to improve the functions of your solutions.

• Call Center

Call center software helps agents to manage customer phone calls. VoIP solutions can record customer calls, maintain call logs, and automatically create customer tickets. Some tools even let you make a customer contact database.

Top 10 Customer Support Software in 2022

Ready to automate your customer support system? Then, always get the best tools suitable to your business niche and customer requirements. In addition, also look for product features, price range, and popularity.

Here are the top 10 customer support software as per our research:

1. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a free tool for growing businesses. If you often lose your customer emails, this tool can organize them for you. It is an easy-to-use tool with integrated CRM support.

Since 2006, HubSpot has helped over 100,000 customers in over 120 countries to receive fast customer service. With HubSpot’s ticketing system, you can easily record, track, and organize your customer issues in a dashboard. It enables you to track key support metrics like ticket volume, agent response time, etc.

When a customer fills out a form or connects via live chat, it can automatically create tickets and assign them to the right person. It also allows you to prioritize tickets to resolve urgent issues instantly. All in all, it is a comprehensive customer service software to use in 2022.

Top Features

• Email templates
• Calling
• Email and chat to ticket
• Scheduling meetings
• Reporting
• Conversion routing
• Customer feedback surveys
• Team management

Pricing Structure:

• Forever free with basic features
• Premium edition for $45 per month
• Professional plan for $360 per month
• Enterprise plan for $1,200 per month

2. Hiver

Hiver is one of the leading help desk solutions built for Google Workspace. Using this software, you can deliver exceptional customer service right from your favorite Google tools like Gmail. That means without any learning curve; you can track and monitor email and live chat queries from the familiar Gmail interface.

Hiver is a popular help desk software used by 1500 companies worldwide, including Canva, Harvard University, Vacasa, Flexport, and many more.

The software also provides email insights, including which emails are opened, pending or closed. Your team can also collaborate using Notes and categorize emails through Tags – all inside Gmail. If you want simple help desk software, Hiver is the best option.

Top Features

• Real-time chat
• Queue management
• Email management and monitoring
• Canned response
• Team collaboration
• Remote support
• Collaboration tools
• Automatic routing
• Ticket management
• Customer feedback and surveys
• Shared inbox

Pricing Structure:

• Lite version for $15 per user/month
• Pro version for $39 per user/month
• Elite version for $59 per user/month
• 50+ teams can customize the plan

3. CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a VoIP solution built for modern and customer-centric companies. It is a superior quality call management software integrated with advanced CRM, an e-commerce system, and help desk support. This tool can fully streamline your customer support system and sales operation.

It is a popular customer support software used by 2500 companies like DHL, Rocher, Glovo, Booksy, etc. With over 140 national phone numbers, CloudTalk is a perfect solution for small and medium businesses looking forward to growing in 2022.

Top Features

• Agent interface
• Call recording
• Employee training
• Feedback
• KPI measurement
• Multiple communication channels
• Workflow management
• Contact database
• Quality management
• Reporting
• Third-party integration

Pricing Structure:

• Starter plan for $25 per user/month
• Essential plan for $30 per user/month
• Expert plan for $50 per user/month
• Large teams can customize the plan

4. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is one of the leading Customer Feedback Survey Software and Experience Management platforms that businesses use to create surveys and share them with their clients to collect feedback via multiple channels. The software not only helps you to collect feedback but also enables you to act on it in real-time and improve customer experience.

From surveys of different types and for various industries to capture Hotel Guest feedback, Patient Feedback, Employee Feedback, Student Feedback, etc. to metric surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys; you can create any type of survey and form with Zonka Feedback and collect actionable data.

With Zonka Feedback’s advanced features like skip logic and hide logic, you can make your surveys dynamic to make them conversational for your audience. Moreover, you get real-time notifications for survey responses, assign tasks to your team members as per the feedback received, take action on it, close the feedback loop, and thus prevent churn. It is one of the best tools if you want to measure and enhance customer satisfaction and improve their overall experience.

Top Features:

• 40+ ready-to-use survey templates
• Customization of surveys
• White labeling of surveys to add your own branding
• Multilingual Surveys
• Multiple channels to share surveys – email, SMS, website, QR codes, Android tablets, and smartphones
• Skip logic, Hide logic, and Survey Redirection
• Measure metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES
• Real-time feedback notifications and custom alerts
• Advanced reporting and dashboard
• Multilocational feedback management
• Closing the feedback loop
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing Structure:

• Free Trial for 15 days
• Paid plan starts at $29/month
• Professional plan for $79/month
• Growth plan for $169//month
• Enterprise plan for $429/month
• Custom plan with personalized solutions and pricing

5. Document360

Document360 is a knowledge base system for companies to create rich self-service material for their customers. Using multiple integrations, you can easily set up a vast knowledge base for your customers and reduce your 50% the workload.

Your team can easily collaborate and create learning material for your customers within the software. It has an advanced markdown editor and analytical features, which helps you revise multiple documents before publishing them online. If you want to provide only self-service customer support to your users, you can definitely use this software.

Top Features

• Knowledge resources categorization
• Knowledge base management
• Self-service portal
• Collaboration tools
• Content management
• Discussions
• Full-text speech

Pricing Structure:

• Startup plan for $99 per project/month
• Business plan for $249 per project/month
• Enterprise plan for $499 per project/month
• Enterprise Plus plan is fully customizable

6. CallHippo

CallHippo is a virtual call center software for modern businesses to provide instant customer support. It is a simple to use solution with ultra-advanced features like a power dialer and automatic call distribution. The software also offers extensive reporting and integration for the sales team to effectively communicate with their customers.

Over 5000 global brands trust CallHippo due to their 24*7 customer support and cross-platform access over both desktop and mobile phones.

Top Features

• Agent interface
• Contact management
• Caller ID
• Automatic call management
• Call recording
• Call monitoring
• Callback scheduling
• CRM
• Telemarketing
• Voice customization
• Text to speech

Pricing Structure:

• A 10-day free trial
• Bronze plan for $16 per user/month
• Silver plan for $24 per user/month
• Platinum plan for $40 per user/month
• Enterprise plan for $48 per user/month

7. ProProfs Chat

ProProfs Chat is an AI-powered live chat platform that allows businesses to provide instant support to their customers. Using this software, you can assure your customers that you are always available for them. The instant chat feature helps you answer customer queries in really-time from anywhere.

ProProfs Chat enables you to reduce customer tickets and resolve their queries faster. This tool can build a happy and satisfied customer base, leading to high ROI.

Top Features

• Customizable branding
• Canned response
• Offline form
• Screen sharing
• Proactive chat
• Website visitor tracking
• Routing
• Third-party integration

Pricing Structure:

• Forever free up to 100 tickets
• Essential plan for $15 per user/month
• A premium plan for $25 per user/month

8. CustomerSuccessBox

CustomerSuccessBox is an AI-charged customer success software to onboard, upsell, retain and drive maximum growth. The AI support enables you to monitor and analyze all customer data and engagement behavior in real-time. Using the historic customer details, it can recommend actions to CSM that drive retention and upsell.

The software is built with a clear mindset to manage and grow the B2B SaaS customer base. It can manage hundreds of customer accounts to reduce churn and grow recurring revenue.

Top Features

• Activity tracking
• Customer engagement
• Account management
• Task management
• Revenue management
• Usage tracking

Pricing Structure:

• Starting from $499 per month

9. Saleshandy

Saleshandy is a platform to send cold emails and manage email marketing campaigns. It can help to increase the company’s outreach operations without compromising quality. Using this tool, you can send thousands of emails with multi-stage automated follow-up emails at once.

Saleshandy cones with tags to customize and organize your email campaigns. You can impress leads with fast response and delivery so they can quickly become your customers.

Top Features

• AB testing
• Campaign management and analytics
• Contact management
• CRM support
• Content delivery
• Email distribution
• Drip campaigns
• Event-triggered actions

Pricing Structure:

• A 14-day free trial
• Cold emails are available for $25 and $60
• Email tracking is forever free, and paid plans start from $9 per month

10. OptiMonk

OptiMonk is a leading conversion optimization and lead generation tool that can quickly turn your traffic into sales. It helps you to design, personalize and launch popups, notifications bars, sidebars and other elements on your site.

The best thing is you don’t need coding knowledge with OptiMonk. Besides this, you can use OptiMonk to build email lists, reduce cart abandonment, promote special offers, collect feedback, social share, and more.

Top Features

• Campaign management
• Account-based marketing
• Behaviour targeting
• AB testing
• Campaign segmentation
• Conversion tracking
• Customizable branding
• Data import/export

Pricing Structure:

• Forever free
• Essential plan for $29 per month
• Growth plan for $79 per month
• A premium plan for $199 per month

11. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is an all-purpose social media management tool. This software can manage all your social media accounts and automate post scheduling on social media platforms.

It is a social media scheduling slash marketing tool for small businesses and digital media teams. It allows social media managers to handle multiple networks from a dashboard, including Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.

Top Features

• Engagement tracking
• Content management
• Automated publishing
• Conversion tracking
• Lead management
• Post scheduling
• Reporting
• ROI tracking
• Social media integration

Pricing Structure:

• A 14-day free trial
• Agency plan for $127.5 per month
• Studio plan for $85 per month
• Small Team plan for $42.5 per month
• Customizable enterprise plan

Just Get Customer Support Software

Be it improving customer experience or the efficiency of your customer service team, having the right tool in your hands is a must. You can empower your service team to resolve customer problems faster with adequate tools.

So, we have already shared the best 10 customer support software to build a robust CX in your organization. Now, go and try the free version of all the suggested tools before upgrading your membership.

Links: All contributed by the Author.

Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

The post 11 Best Customer Support Software in 2022 appeared first on ReadWrite.

Modern SEO is a complex discipline. That’s because search engines use a wide variety of signals to determine SERP placements. And that means there are countless aspects of web pages that need attention to achieve results

But without a doubt, link building is one of the most critical parts of the SEO process. The quantity and quality of the backlinks leading to a page play a huge role in its search engine ranking. And it’s been that way since the earliest days of search

But in the old days, all backlinks counted equally. And that led to abuse in the form of link farms and other black hat linking schemes. In response, Google and other search engines cracked down on that type of manipulation and worked tirelessly to update their algorithm to detect it

Today, your site would be penalized for attempting to use black hat techniques to improve SERP performance. But there are still a variety of white hats – or legitimate, relevant – backlink building techniques that work well. And while they do take a great deal of work, time, and care to execute, the payoff is tremendous

To help, here’s a top to bottom guide on the subject. We’ll cover what white hat link building is, how it compares to black hat techniques, and the pitfalls to watch out for. Then, we’ll cover 7 white hat link-building tactics that can propel your site to the top of the search engine results pages. Let’s get to it

What is White Hat Link Building?

White hat link building refers to techniques that encourage other authority websites to link to your own. And they all rely on organic linking and not on paid placement of any kind. And the reason white hat link-building strategies aren’t penalized by search engines is that they result in links that add value to the content they appear in

Recently, even John Muller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has confirmed that it is ok to outreach to the websites and share that you have a good piece published on your website and if they like it they can link to it or let their audience know about it.

White Hat Vs. Black Hat Link Building

Where white hat link building relies on generating useful, high-quality links, black hat link building typically seeks to generate backlinks by any means necessary. As SEO techniques go, they are the polar opposites of one another. And because search engines prioritize their users’ search experience above all else, they frown upon sites trying to gain relevance by resorting to tricks and inorganic linking

Common white hat SEO link-building techniques include things like including backlinks within guest posts on other sites or within a related author profile, or through relationship building with other site owners. Those relationships can then become the basis of niche edit requests, where a site owner suggests some relevant content on their site to the other site owner or proposes a barter arrangement

Black hat techniques, by contrast, are attempted shortcuts around all of that hard work. A popular one is the use of private blog networks (PBNs), which are clusters of blogs that exist for little purpose other than to be a vehicle for backlinks. And another is the use of automated link placement tools that focus on link quantity rather than quality. The thing they all have in common is that they’re risky attempts to trick search engines that can backfire spectacularly

7 White Hat Link Building Techniques

Now that you know the difference between white hat and black hat link-building techniques, it should be obvious that the former is the only viable way to achieve SEO success. It should also be obvious why that’s the case. And to help you to develop creative link-building strategies that result in high-quality white-hat links, here are 7 white hat link-building techniques that you can use to push your website to the top of the search rankings

1. High-Quality Content

The core of any link-building strategy has to be the creation of high-quality content to support it. This serves two distinct purposes. First, it creates real visitor engagement that lets search engines know that sending traffic your way is worthwhile. And second, it provides a legitimate reason for other sites to link to your content

Creating high-quality content is one of the SEO best practices that are so fundamental that it should be obvious. But creating high-quality content takes a great deal of research and work. And that’s why it’s considered a white hat technique

You have to put in the time to analyze the pages that rank well for your target keywords, and then create content that represents the best features of them all. This creates a powerful incentive for authority sites to link to your content, creating a beneficial loop that continually improves your SERP performance

2. Guest Blogging

Another powerful white hat link-building technique is to find opportunities to guest post on related, high-authority websites. 53% of marketers believe that link building helps in improving ranking in search engines. Put simply, Google values the opinions of the websites that score well in its ranking algorithm. And getting a backlink to your content from any of those sites reflects well on your site because it represents that site’s seal of approval in Google’s eyes

But you can’t simply pay an authority site to include outbound links to your own. That’s because Google’s algorithm takes the quality of your backlinks into account in addition to their origin. So you have to find a way to get those backlinks organically, which is what you achieve with guest posting. And it’s an easy but time-consuming tactic to master

You don’t have to be a renowned expert in your field to guest post and you can learn how to do guest blogging even if you don’t have much writing experience. What’s important is to do your research and create content that will add value to the site you’re guest posting on. And if you can do that, you’ll find that other sites will be quite receptive to publishing your work

3. The Skyscraper Technique

One of the additional benefits that come with creating quality content is that it enables another kind of white hat link-building tactic. It’s called the skyscraper technique, and it refers to the process of creating content that’s superior to something that already ranks well, and then working to replicate its backlinks. It’s a tactic that requires plenty of work, but that can be worth its weight in gold when done right

The way that the skyscraper technique works is a simple three-step process. They are:

• Identify a target keyword and look for a high-ranking result for that keyword you think you can improve on
• Create your superior content
• Reach out to the sites that have linked to the original and ask them to consider switching their links to your superior version

The reason that this is such a great approach is that it’s less risky than creating brand-new untested content. By working to improve on something that has already attracted quality backlinks, you already know there’s ample demand for what you’re creating. And while the skyscraper technique is a little bit cut-throat as far as white hat link building goes, it’s a legitimate and viable tactic to include in your link building strategy

4. Moving Man Method

Because the internet isn’t static, content tends to come and go offline with some frequency. And you can use that to your advantage to execute another white-hat link-building tactic called the moving man method. As its name implies, it revolves around finding ways to replace links to content that’s gone offline or is otherwise inaccessible with your own

The process is simple. You begin by identifying content that has a large volume of quality backlinks, or a handful of especially valuable ones that’s either moved or gone offline. Then, you replicate that content and ask the sites that linked to the original to consider replacing those dead links with ones to your site

The hardest part of this technique is finding broken links to target in the first place. But you can begin that process by looking for competitors in your market that has rebranded or gone out of business. Then, find the sites that still have backlinks to those competitors. Once you’ve identified a missing piece of content that has plenty of broken backlinks, the rest is simple

5. Niche Edits

Another way you can build backlinks is to create content that’s specifically designed to add value to an existing high-ranking page, and then ask that page’s owner to link to it. It’s a process that’s known as making niche edits, and it’s an excellent white hat link-building technique

The reason for that is simple. It benefits both parties and has no real downsides. In other words, you gain a backlink and the site that links to you improves the value of its content, thereby protecting its own page rank

The only caveat is that some site owners will only consider making niche edits if you pay them to do it. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it can increase your costs significantly if you’re not prepared for it. So it’s best to feel out the owner of your desired linking site partner before creating too much-customized content. If they’re open to niche edits, then you’ll be clear to proceed

6. Reciprocal Linking

One of the most basic white hat link-building tactics is also the simplest to execute. It’s to link to trusted websites as your content sources and then asking them to link to your article in return. This kind of reciprocal linking makes up a large portion of earned backlinks, as all you’re doing is trading some outbound links for some inbound links to your site. Do it with a limited number of websites only to avoid any risk of creating too many 2-way backlinks

Be aware, however, that not all site owners will be willing to engage in reciprocal linking. This is especially true if your site lacks authority. There’s just not enough in it for the other site to make the effort worth it. So, although it’s not impossible to succeed with a reciprocal link-building effort early in your site’s life, it’s a tactic that becomes increasingly valuable as its status grows later on

7. Blog Commenting

Although there’s some debate about how well blog commenting works as a white hat backlink strategy, there’s reason to believe it can still play a role in your overall link-building efforts. It’s also very easy to execute. All you have to do is look for content on high-authority websites that satisfy three major criteria:

• The content is related to your industry or the keywords you’re targeting
• The content allows comments from visitors
• The comment section doesn’t implement a nofollow tag

If you find a high-authority site with content that satisfies these criteria, all you have to do is leave a comment that includes a link to your website. Of course, you’ll want your comment to add something to the discussion on the page, as obvious link insertions are frowned upon and will likely be deleted. Over time, doing this will improve your site’s SERP performance and should also create some additional organic traffic

White Hat Link Building Techniques are the Core of Good SEO Strategy

The bottom line here is simple. Achieving top SERP performance involves trying to improve several facets of your site and its content simultaneously. And, because Google and the other search engines never reveal the exact composition of their ranking algorithms, it’s like trying to hit an ever-moving target

But making efforts to gain as many high-quality backlinks to your site and its content as possible has always been the one sure way to improve search performance. And although the ways that your backlinks are measured may change, their relative value will always remain high. So that means white hat link building using the methods detailed here should always be at the core of your overall SEO strategy

And taking shortcuts will only lead to penalties and even more work. So all that’s left to do is assemble your SEO strategy using the tactics here that make the most sense for your site, and then execute it with everything you’ve got

Image Credit: provided by the author; thank you!

The post 7 White Hat Link Building Techniques to Improve Your Websites Ranking appeared first on ReadWrite.

Have you just launched your startup? Congratulations! You’ve done a great job. Now you should take the next step – you should build an effective digital marketing plan and start getting the word out about your startup.

Luckily, we live in the digital world where companies of any level, including local businesses and new startups, can afford to promote their products online.

The only problem is that there is a great variety of digital marketing strategies for startups out there. So if you are a newbie in the field, it might be challenging for you to understand what startup branding strategy is better for you to choose.

If you opt for the right strategy, you will get your brand noticed and make your startup project successful. But if you choose the wrong marketing tactic, you will waste your time and money and achieve no positive results.

Do you need help with making the right strategic choice? Keep on reading. In this article, you will find the most effective growth hacking strategies for startups.

Why Is Digital Marketing Important for Startups?

While traditional marketing is associated with high costs, digital marketing is considered a more affordable solution. In contrast to TV commercials and print ads that usually cost thousands of dollars, the price for the Facebook ad campaign or single blog post may start as low as a few bucks.

Cost-effectiveness is not the only benefit of digital marketing strategies for startups. Online marketing allows new businesses to reach a wider audience and develop more meaningful relationships with customers.

• Research your target audience

By leveraging digital marketing tools, you can get to know your target audience better. For example, you can find out how old your customers are, where they live, what preferences they have, and how they behave online. This information will help you improve your product, enhance customer experience, and boost your marketing efforts.

• Build trust

Modern customers are aware that there are lots of scammers on the web. For this reason, they don’t trust new brands that don’t have a solid online presence. Therefore, you should leverage digital marketing strategies for small business startups to convince people that your company is a real and trustworthy one.

• Engage your target audience

The rule of thumb is: if you want your startup project to succeed, be there where your customers are. If you target millennials and Generation Z, who spend an average of 5.2 hours and 9 hours (omnidigitalmarketing.co.uk/) a day respectively consuming content on mobile — you must grow your online presence. Otherwise, it will be challenging for you to engage customers and increase revenue.

• Help your customers make more informed purchase decisions

Gone are the days when companies successfully used intrusive marketing tactics to make people spend money.
Today, customers don’t trust brand messages. Instead, they tend to make more informed purchase decisions. They read blog posts, analyze product reviews, and contact companies via chatbots and messengers to ask additional questions.

If you want your startup to thrive, you should build a comprehensive content marketing strategy to guide customers to the right buying decisions.

• Optimize your marketing budget

Online marketing strategies for startups usually include the use of more than one marketing tactic. By leveraging email marketing, influencer marketing, PPC advertising, and SEO, startups can reach a wide audience quickly and make the first sales right after launch. Since every business is unique and has its unique goals, business owners can use different tactics at different points of time to maximize efforts and optimize the marketing budget.

6 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies For Startups

We’ve already figured out why digital marketing is important. Now let’s talk about the best marketing strategies for startups.

1. Build a website

The first thing you should do to start marketing your startup is to establish your web presence and build your brand.
Your main task here is to build a website for your startup that will stand out from the crowd and appeal to the target audience. Here are several tips for you to follow:

• Create compelling content for the “About Us” page. Write about who you are, what you do, and what your innovative product is all about. Consider using storytelling to engage your website visitors.
• Add testimonials, if any. Modern customers value real customer reviews in the first place.
• Proofread page descriptions. Since bad grammar may scare prospective clients away, you need to ensure that your website is free from spelling errors and typos.
• Add visuals. Use photos, videos, infographics, charts, and other visual content to grab and retain your website visitors’ attention.
• Be mindful about choosing the color scheme and design of your site. Make sure your website looks visually appealing while also reflecting your brand’s visual identity.

2. Start a blog

If you want to attract more users to your website and become a thought leader in your niche, you need to start a blog. You should create high-quality content and share it with your target audience. Here are a few useful tips for you:
Use the best marketing tools like BuzzSumo and SEMrush to discover content ideas quickly.

Visit blogs and forums that are popular among your target audience. Analyze the frequently asked questions and define the topics which are worth covering in your blog.

If you don’t have a content creator in your team, get writing help from freelance writers or writing companies. Check out the following sites: PeoplePerHour, TrustMyPaper, Upwork. You can hire writers for one-time projects, or you can opt for long-term collaboration.

Add a “Write for us” page to your website and start accepting guest posts from bloggers and freelance writers. Get free content in exchange for backlinks.

3. Leverage SEO optimization

Digital marketing goes hand in hand with SEO (search engine optimization). Whatever content you create, you should optimize it for Google. If you don’t do it, your site will never show up on the first page of search results, and people will never know about your startup.
Here are three key aspects of SEO:

• Unique, valuable content
• Quality backlinks
• On-page SEO

If you want to improve your website ranking, you should do the following:

• Research keywords. Use Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or similar tools to find relevant long-tail keywords and then naturally integrate keywords into your content.
• Make your text skimmable. Add at least one heading per every 200 words and use bulleted lists where possible.
• Improve text readability. Replace sophisticated, rarely-used words with simpler alternatives. Avoid passive voice. Keep your sentences short (under 20 words).
• Write short and descriptive titles (under 60 characters) and meta descriptions (under 160 characters) for each page. Make sure to add a keyword.
• Build backlinks. Improve content quality to earn backlinks that come from high-domain authority websites. Try out various link-building techniques.

4. Build an email marketing strategy

Email marketing is one of the best low-cost marketing strategies for startups. According to the Campaign Monitor report, 64.1% of all startups use email marketing in their practices.

How can you get the most out of your email marketing strategy?

• Use each and every opportunity to build an email list. Create a pop-up for each webpage. Embed a sign-up form on your website. Use lead magnets (checklists, e-books, white papers, etc.) to encourage people to share their emails.
• Create informative, interesting-to-read emails. Don’t send emails that don’t add value to the recipients, resulting in a high unsubscribe rate.
• Add one or two CTAs to every email. Then, encourage users to visit your website, buy your product, or perform any other action to increase your conversion rates.

5. Advertise your startup on Google

Blogging, email marketing, and SEO optimization are great marketing tools for achieving long-term marketing goals. However, if you want to get immediate marketing results and make sales, you should use PPC (price-per-click) advertising.

What steps should you take to promote your startup on Google successfully?

• Choose the right keyword to get in front of potential customers searching for products similar to yours.
• Write a winning ad copy. Choose the words wisely to intrigue the user with your offer. If copywriting is not your cup of tea, visit Supreme Dissertations and get help from professional writers.
• Set up a campaign experiment. Leverage A/B testing to optimize your PPC campaign.

6. Take advantage of social media marketing

Social media is an integral part of modern customers’ life. And you can’t ignore this fact. If you want to stay connected with your target audience, you should grow your social media presence.

Before you do it, consider the following:

• You don’t need to be present on each existing social media platform. Instead, you should choose one or two platforms that your customers use the most.
• Interact with your customers in every way possible. Reply to their comments, invite them to participate in polls, encourage them to ask you questions.
• Strive to build a community. Share insights and strive to engage people who support your startup.

Try out these digital marketing strategies for startup

You will never know which digital marketing strategy is the best for your startup until you try. There is no one universal solution that works equally effectively for every company.

We highly suggest you try out these six online marketing strategies for startups and compare their effectiveness. It will help you understand how you should distribute your marketing budget to get the desired outcomes.

Image Credit: serpstat; pexels; thank you!

The post 6 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Startup in 2021 appeared first on ReadWrite.

While the COVID-19 global pandemic has compelled most businesses to cut their expenses, there is an even more compelling need for balancing accounts, inventory management, and avoiding customer churn. Even the marketing sector has undergone a huge paradigm shift with automated lead generation for better and deeper reach amongst the masses.

Lead generation is one of the most important elements of B2B marketing and is consequential for the growth and thriving of a business. But, then again, is Lead Gen really such a difficult task?

The process of Lead Gen begins with identifying and reaching the right consumer masses, getting them to visit your website, product, and service catalog, and convincing them to purchase for lead conversion. It doesn’t end here as you have to put constant efforts to nurture these leads for a lifetime.

The way to begin is to have the right lead generation tools. These tools are consequential and have distinguishing features that you will want to explore.

Features of Lead Generation Tools

Here are some of the common features that a lead generation tool must-have.

1. Usability

Top lead generation tools offer impeccable ease-of-use and make the entire job of spreading the word across the masses easier and better. They don’t require core technical aptitude or coding skills for the best results.

2. Platform Integration

The modern business landscape integrates different types of business software and automation that work in close association to achieve the desired business outcomes. So, all the top lead generation tools offer seamless integration across all the major platforms for effortless working.

3. Diverse Functionality

Best lead generation software has a diverse set of features and functionalities for holistic and comprehensive support to marketers. From analytics to reporting and from lead flows to landing pages – lead generation tools come with a rich toolbox for marketers.

4. Landing Page Builders

As per Forbes, businesses with more than 40 landing pages get 12 times more leads than those with five or lesser landing pages. Further, landing pages with videos can increase your conversions by 80%.

And, these stats indicate the importance of having a robust and reliable landing page builder tool. When you can automate the entire process, you automate lead conversion, which is certainly a major business growth driver.

5. Marketing Dashboards

All-inclusive marketing dashboards for B2B and B2C marketers are yet another important feature offered by the top lead generation tools. These dashboards are equipped with everything a marketer might need for lead generation, marketing automation, lead management, account-based marketing, and much more.

After having a brief overview of the various important features of lead generation software, let us move on to explore its different types.

Types of Lead Generation Tools

Lead generation tools can be broadly divided into the following categories:

1. Email Marketing Tools

These tools offer unparalleled performance when it comes to online lead generation and is among the best online lead generation tools.

2. Email Lookup Tools

They prove to be extremely useful when you need to connect with people that are not on your email list. These tools allow you to find their email addresses and contact details and help you connect with them.

3. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation tools automate tasks such as social media posting, email marketing, and ad campaigns, etc. Hence, they not only improve work efficiency, but they also help marketers in offering more personalized customer experiences.

4. Calendar Scheduling

The calendar scheduling tools help you overcome the challenges of scheduling meetings and by-pass the back-and-forth email chains. They give your prospects more flexibility and keep your calendar packed effortlessly.

5. Form Collection Tools

Form collection tools do the task of collecting email addresses and other personal contact details of your website visitors that can be your prospective customers. They help you create the email lists for drip campaigns and content promotion, etc.

6. PopUps

Popups do an incredible job when it comes to grabbing the attention of your visitors. They also collect email addresses and other personal details.

7. Live Chat

Live chat tools allow you to cater to your website visitors in many ways. From grabbing the attention via chat prompts to displaying the messages regarding the latest deals, to solving queries, etc. – they allow potential customers to get in touch with your team in a quick manner.

8. Inbound Lead Generation Tools

These tools help you bring more leads to your website and other channels. It involves creating content and campaigns to drive more traffic to your website, which leads to conversions.

9. Contests

Contest tools are great for creating brand awareness and getting the participants and people, in general, to sign up for your email list. Once done, you can continue to add them to your email drip campaigns.

10. Marketing Management Tools

The marketing management tools help you maximize lead generation, measure performance, and improve the quality of leads.

11. Social Media and Forum Tools

When it comes to collecting leads from social media channels and forums, these tools offer the best assistance by collecting the email addresses and other contact information from social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Now, let’s dive in and take a quick look at the top lead generation tools and what makes them worthy of their ranking.

Top Lead Generation Tools

Without further ado, let’s look at the best lead-gen tools.

1. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is one of the top lead generation tools that are smart and allows you to ask the right question at the right time and gather quality feedback from your customers and visitors.

You can show the surveys and popup lead generation forms on your website as well. You can target the customers via specific actions, events, behavioral patterns, cookies, location, and even the data received from your apps.

It offers advanced targeting and a unique feature – Qualaroo Nudges that improve your response rates as well.

Pricing:

There are three plans – FREE, ESSENTIALS ($25 pm), and PREMIUM ($50 pm). You can use any one of them for free for 15 days.

2. ProProfs Chat

ProProfs Chat is one of the top inbound lead generation tools that optimizes your sales funnel. It allows you to capture qualified leads and saves them to a CRM software of your choice. One unique feature is the “announcements” via which you can share the upcoming events, sales, updates, and new product launches with your website visitors.

It offers multi-faceted engagement tactics that your sales team can use to identify upsell opportunities.

You can use ProProfs Chat to create a highly reliable lead generation system that comes with important features such as a customized pre-chat form by which you can collect data and direct the incoming visitor queries to the right teams or departments.

Pricing:

There are three plans – FREE, ESSENTIALS ($12.75), and PREMIUM ($17). You can use any one of them for free for 15 days.

3. AeroLeads

AeroLeads is an internet-based lead generation tool that allows you to capture qualified leads in the form of company details and email addresses. It sits as a sleek Google Chrome plug-in and allows you to add the contact details to a lead management page.

You can search and add the contact details collected by the AeroLeads plug-in to see them on the lead management page finally. Next, you can edit, filter, and sort the collected leads easily. It can be easily integrated with other major platforms and software.

Pricing:

You can select from their four plans- TAKE OFF ($49 pm), CLIMB ($149 pm), CRUISE ($499 pm), ENTERPRISE (Price decided on a call with the team)

4. Mediatoolkit

Mediatoolkit is an online media monitoring and analysis tool that can help you learn about all your social media mentions 24X7 from any source in the world.

You can automate your social media and website monitoring and filter the results via powerful search filters, such as Tags, Boolean Search, Location filters, and Language filters, etc.

It has a unique data analysis dashboard that helps you do the sentiment analysis, influence scoring, and generate excel data sheets for reporting and assessment. You can create custom alerts and save your data in various forms such as PDF files or excel sheets etc.

Pricing:

There are four plans, Pro: 117$ pm, Medium Business: 444$ pm, Enterprise: 1100$ pm, Agency: Pricing on call.

5. ProProfs Survey Maker

A cloud-based software, ProProfs Survey Maker, empowers you to gather qualified leads and capture their recurring troubles.

The software comes with an impeccable knowledge base and a huge library of questions that allow you to understand the purchase intent, exit intent, and overall experience of your customers and prospects.

It allows you to customize the customer interactions and comes with a fantastic survey distribution system that distributes surveys via email, website, social media, and embedded links.

So, the odds of you reaching the relevant prospects are higher and better.

Pricing:

There are three plans – FREE, ESSENTIALS ($50 pm), and PREMIUM ($100 pm). You can use any one of them for free for 15 days.

6. LeadQuizzes

LeadQuizzes is another impressive online quiz maker that is one of the best lead generation software for SMEs and start-ups.

The marketers can create surveys, increase their leads, and learn about their customer behavior without needing a developer. The tool comes with powerful popup controls that allow you to capture more leads and data from your website.

Pricing:

There are three plans – Standard: $49, Pro: $99, Premium: $249.

7. Poptin

Poptin lets you create engaging forms and popups for your websites within minutes and helps you make an offer that your customers cannot refuse.

It helps you reduce shopping cart abandonment by offering popups and boosts visitor engagement by conducting surveys and collecting feedback. You can make user-relevant offers for better-personalized experiences and make use of the autoresponder emails to send coupons or welcome emails to improve customer experience.

Poptin allows you to create Email forms, Advanced forms, and Contact forms, etc., for improved lead generation.

Pricing:

There are four plans to choose from – FREE Plan, Basic Plan ($19), Pro Plan ($49), Agency ($99)

8. RollWorks

RollWorks is an account-based platform that is perfect for B2B marketers and ABM solution seekers. This is powered by machine and data learning and is undoubtedly one of the top lead generation tools.

The tool comes with the ABM Readiness Assessment Guide that empowers the B2B marketers with the right insight into their ABM readiness. You can identify the ideal customer profile for your business and target accounts and key buyers to improve your ROI.

You can also engage the existing accounts and measure the impact of your lead generation activities.

Pricing:

There are four plans, out of which the Starter plan is available at $975 per month, and the others, namely – Standard, Professional, and Ultimate, require team contact for pricing.

9. Aimtell

Aimtell offers better visitor engagement via web push notifications and helps you acquire, engage, and retain leads as well as customers after they leave your website.

You can send highly personalized push notifications to your visitors, customers, and prospects for better reach and better customer engagement. You can acquire subscribers and automate their user journeys effortlessly.

Pricing:

There are four plans to select from – Basic: $49, Plus: $99, Pro: $199, Enterprise: $299

10. VisitorQueue

VisitorQueue allows you to identify the name, user data, and contact details of the people and businesses that visit your website. You can share the collected data with your team and enjoy better conversions without much ado.

The tool allows you to access the key decision-makers’ contact details of other companies or businesses that visit your website. You can enjoy an unlimited number of users in every plan, and the tool comes with dedicated customer support.

You can enjoy seamless integration across all the major platforms and software.

Pricing:

Five plans are priced according to the number of unique companies per month – 100 companies: $31, 300 companies: $63, 500 companies: $79, 1000 companies: $135, 2000 companies: $199

11. LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer is an automated lead generation tool that speeds up the lead qualification and helps you grow your revenue. You can capture new leads and also gain actionable insights into your website visitors.

The tool offers real-time information about online visitors and shows the users currently interacting with your website. You can optimize workflows to solve your customer intelligence issues by using this tool.

Pricing:

There are two plans – Basic: $231 pm, Premium: $586 pm.

12. Outgrow

Outgrow allows you to create engaging, interactive content such as assessments, quizzes, surveys, polls, and calculators. All of them are top lead generation content pieces and can be generated with ease without any coding experience.

You can share the content as a slide, pop-up, or embed it on a webpage or URL of your choice. Outgrow comes with many pre-built templates and impressive layouts optimized for engagement, conversion, and screen sizes.

This tool has a separate dashboard for better end-to-end analytics and can integrate with more than 500 3rd party sales and marketing tools. You can also add buttons like ‘Follow,’ ‘Like,’ and CTAs such as ‘share’ on the result page.

Pricing:

There are four plans – Freelancer (Quiz Only): $14 mo, Freelancer: $25 mo, Essentials: $95 mo. and Business: $600 mo.

13. Optinmonster

Optinmonster is one of the best lead generation tools that help you grow your email list exponentially.

The easy drag-and-drop builder allows anyone to create stunning pop-ups and lead generation forms that can be optimized for higher conversion rates. With more than 50 in-built templates, you can create six types of lead generation content, of which some are highly impressive, such as full-screen welcome mat, floating bar, and lightbox pop-up.

The worth of Optinmonster lies in its powerful segmentation and targeting engine that allows you to offer highly personalized customer experiences. You can target the right people at the right time by showing a highly relevant offer.

Further, Optinmonster works on all types of websites and platforms seamlessly.

Pricing: There are four plans – Basic plan: $9, Plus Plan: $19, Pro Plan: $29, and Growth Plan: $49.

14. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is one of the best lead data collection tools and enables you to identify details of your visitors, such as their Email addresses, and company names, etc.

What makes Leadfeeder an amazing tool is that it tells you what companies visited your website even when they don’t fill any contact form.

It also finds the contact information of the employees working at that company, so you have the leads that never inquired about your products and could turn out to be excellent potential leads for your sales pipeline. You can install the Leadfeeder Tracker for a trial.

Pricing: The LITE plan is available for free, and the PREMIUM Plan is priced at $55 monthly.

15. Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a type of prospecting and outreach tool that allows you to turn your contacts into sales and leads. It is an automated lead generation software that not only helps you find the email addresses of your prospects but also verifies them.

You can also track the data on every interaction by using Prospect.io. It is a modern sales automation platform that integrates effortlessly and sits quietly in your browser as an extension.

So, whenever you want, you can launch a cold Email campaign right from your browser and allows you to sell your products and services to decision-makers.

Pricing: There are two plans – Essential: $149 and Business: $299, both billed monthly.

16. Reply.io

Reply.io is an Email look-up tool that automates your sales outreach list, such as follow-ups, personal details, tasks, social touchpoints, and calls.

It automates the manual tasks of a sales rep, such as sending a follow-up. The tool comes with several integrations and team management tools that allow for efficient and effortless working.

The tool extension allows you to add new contacts to your multi-channel sequences, make direct calls, and manage & access your tasks.

Pricing: There are three plans – Individual: $70, Business: $60, and Enterprise: $50, all billed monthly.

17. Leadformly

Leadformly offers more than 50 templates that are customizable and relevant to different industries. It is a LeadForm builder where each form is built with more than 58 best practices in the UX domain.

The software increases the completion rates and usability of the LeadForms and helps you avoid the big lead leaks via forms. The forms can be embedded anywhere and come with lead scoring and notifications.

Easy customization, intelligent validation, conditional logic, and insightful analytics are the other perks offered by Leadformly.

Pricing: The software is available for $179 billed annually, and a free trial is also available.

18. Hellobar

Hellobar is another commendable lead generation tool that will not only increase your website visitor’s stay time but also pursues them to take the action that you want them to.

The software is easy to use and allows you to use it as a bribing tool (a free eBook or user guide etc.) for your visitors.

Hellobar also allows you to send traffic to a specific landing page, and it can help increase the social media following and likes.

Pricing: The price is based on the number of click-throughs per month. 100 click-throughs: $4.95, 500 click-throughs: $12.95, and 2500 click-throughs: $29.95.

19. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most famous lead generation software that also helps you build your brand. This is undoubtedly one of the easiest Email marketing platforms.

MailChimp is intuitive in nature and comes with a drag-and-drop Email builder that makes it easier to create stunning Emails.

It also comes with Email automation and can store 200 email contacts while sending 12000 Emails per month. The software comes with customizable sign-up forms and segment lists for lead nurturing.

Pricing: There are four plans – Free: $0, Essentials: $10.39, Standard: $15.52, and Premium: $310.49, billed monthly.

20. Marketo

Marketo is a lead management solution that offers many other features, such as Email marketing, lead scoring, analytics, lead management, etc.

As far as lead management is concerned, Marketo offers segmentation, lead nurturing, CRM lead generation, online behavior tracking, lead scoring, and grading and Automated alerts (tasks).

Marketo comes with basic reporting for analytics, program management, A/B Testing, and Automated Email Responses. It can easily manage Email deliverability and can also send outbound Emails.

Pricing: The pricing information can be availed via calls to sales reps.

Summarizing all Tools

Given below is a tabular summary of all the tools discussed above that offer you a quick review of all their features. Take a look and zero in on the tool that suits your business the best.

Top Lead Generation Tools at a Glance:

Final Verdict

Lead generation tools help you to plan your business growth trajectory in a focused manner. From landing pages, surveys to advanced analytics, lead generation tools reveal your customer’s pulse and create quality business prospects.

You can choose from a plethora of lead generation tools after shortlisting your needs and requirements.

For example, if you need a cost-effective tool for creating an email sales campaign, MailChimp will be the best fit.

Further, for understanding the social media mention of your brands, you can opt for Mediatoolkit. Lastly, for creating employee engagement and NPS surveys, you could consider using ProProfs Survey Maker. You could also try out a combination of tools to meet your business needs.

Want to share your thoughts? Please feel free to drop your comments below.

The post Top Lead Generation Tools to Grow Your Business appeared first on ReadWrite.

Did you know that 48% of customers would be more likely to return to a website with chat support, and 41% of customers trust the brand more when the chat support option is available? These numbers give insights on how live chat software is perceived and how much a business can gain from its use.

What options do your customers prefer?

Out of those who prefer live chat 79% said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly — 51% liked chat because they could multitask and talk at the same time — and 46% agreed chat support was the most efficient communication method.

What these stats tell us about chat support is that with its use, you get the options to:

• Deliver instant support
• Help customers and your operators multitask
• Bridge the communication gap between your customers and you

That’s why you need to get the best live chat software for your online business. To help you find the best chat support — we’ve curated a list of top 10 live chat software solutions that have made a mark successfully in 2020.

What is Live Chat Software?

Live chat software is an online service that enables your business to connect faster with customers in real-time. Just like a messenger, live chat allows you to connect with multiple customers at the same time.

In addition to these benefits, the use of live chat also helps you capture more leads, close more sales, and increase customer satisfaction. And while the use of the tool seems beneficial for your business, your customers may have different reasons to use the tool such as:

• 42% of consumers say that they prefer live chat functions because they don’t have to wait on hold
• 79% of customers say that the use of live chat helps them get their questions answered quickly
• 51% of customers believe that the use of live chat software helps them to multitask during the support process
• 46% of customers express how they find live chat software as the most efficient form of communication method

These numbers clearly state a win-win situation for both the customers and your business online. But the question is, how does live chat work?

How Does Live Chat Work?

A live chat has two interfaces. While one is visible to your customers, the other can be used by your operators. Let’s understand the two interfaces below and see how live chat works.

Operator Window

Operator window, also known as monitor window, is the interface that enables your operators to track and monitor visitor behavior in real-time. Although the features of the operator window vary from software to software, still there are a few common features that you are likely to find across all live chat software solutions.

Some of them include:

• The number of visitors online
• The pages they browse in real-time
• The number of co-operators online
• The number of chats other operators are managing at the same time
• The amount of time a visitor spends on your website
• Access to the previous chat history
• Access to previous chat transcripts
• Operator-to-operator chat to increase collaboration during an ongoing conversation

The access to such features helps your operators to understand visitors better and initiate a chat with them in strategic moments. Other than the list of features mentioned above, some chat solutions also allow your operators to monitor and join ongoing chats. In short, the operator window helps your support reps to weave the best experience for your visitors/customers.

Visitor Window

Visitor window is the interface that the visitors on your website get to see when they click on the chat button for support. Your visitors can either initiate a chat or accept an incoming chat from your operators through their chat interface.

Besides this, three other features will be visible once the visitor opens the chat window for support. These features include the following.

• Pre-chat FormTo capture quality leads, a pre-chat form is considered to be one of the most crucial features in a live chat. You can gather details like name, phone number, address, email id, and more based on the nature of your business. You can even customize your pre-chat form fields to capture specific information about your visitors.
• Offline MessagesAnother form that your visitors can see when they open a chat window for support is offline message form. However, it is only visible if your operators aren’t online or your business hours for the day are over. With the use of this form, visitors can still reach out to your brand for support. Plus, you can avoid missing out on support opportunities too.
• Self-help Article LinksThe self-help articles are the latest feature in live chat solutions and isn’t available in all the options you may see below. However, its use is perfect for visitors who’d like to find answers fast and on their own accord. You can add self-help article links to your chat window to enable your visitors to find answers instantly and reduce your support chats and tickets effectively.

With these two live chat interfaces, we get to see how live chat works for a business. Now, let’s see how to add one to your website in minutes.

How to Add Live Chat to Your Website?

Every live chat solution has one thing in common – the installation process.

To add live chat to your website, you’ll see that all solutions would have most of the steps common. So, let’s lay out those common steps for you and see how to add a live chat to your website in less than five minutes below.

Step #1: It is common across all the live chat solutions – sign up.

Before you install a live chat on your website and start giving support, sign up for the solution you think works best according to your business needs.

Step #2: Another common step you’ll notice is to navigate and find the chat code.

Some may be easily found, others need to be searched for in the settings options.

Step #3: Finally it’s time to visit your website’s source code.

Once you find the chat code, all you have to do is copy and paste the code in your website’s source code and save. And you are done!

In a matter of three simple steps, you get to add a live chat software to our website in less than five minutes and you are up and ready to offer support to your visitors in real-time.

Why Add Live Chat to Your Website?

Well, you may have come across a lot of reasons so far while reading the article on why add a live chat to your website. Let’s summarize them below.

• Offer instant, live support to customers in need of a solution
• Monitor visitor behavior and initiate a chat in strategic moments
• Easy to install
• Convenient communication channel for customers as they wait time reduces in comparison to phone support
• Enables both customers and operators to multitask during the support process

But just in case these reasons aren’t enough for you to get a live chat for your support process, then we’ve got more for you. Let’s take a look at them below.

1. Capture Qualified Leads for Your Business

To get more business, it is important to capture qualified leads for your business. And thanks to the use of live chat, you get to do that effectively.

Features like visitor monitoring, pre-chat form, and offline message form help you learn if your target audience has approached your brand or not. And if the answer is yes, then automatically store them to your favorite CRM platform. It will help your sales team to approach them later on.

2. Boost Sales

We all know that live chat helps you provide instant support to customers. But as per studies it also helps you to boost business revenues.

For customers who chat before making a purchase, there is a 10% increase in average order value, a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour, and a 40% conversion rate.

3. Increase Customer Loyalty

48% would be more likely to return to a website with chat support, and 41% trust the brand more when this option is available.

Another reason why you should get a live chat for your website is that it helps you to boost customer loyalty. Remember that ‘loyalty starts with awesome support’ and if you can offer that to customers efficiently, then you are likely to see more returning customers too.

4. Improve Website Engagement

For 41% of consumers, online chat, and live support is their preferred channel when it comes to engaging with companies digitally.

Want to make sure you engage better with your website visitors? Add a live chat to your website. Real-time engagement helps you to find and offer relevant product recommendations to your customers, while your customers would find solutions faster. In short, it is a win-win situation for both.

5. Improves Operator Performance

Live chat also helps you to improve operator performance, which ultimately results in reduced support costs. Let’s see how.

• Your operators can manage multiple chats at the same time. Unlike phone support, where agents can take one call at a time, each chat operator gets to manage more than 4 visitors at the same time. This also means that you can hire reps based on how many chats they can answer and run your support process at a lesser cost.
• Your operators no longer have to get up from their seats and ask for assistance from their fellow team members for a support request. All they have to do is initiate an operator to operator chat with the one who can best help them resolve a query faster.
• Operator performance reports give you insights on who is the star performer of your team and who needs to improve further.

These are more than convincing reasons to add a live chat to your website. They are also one of the determining factors that help you get the best live chat software for your online business. And to help you do that, we’ve curated a list of top 10 best live chat software solutions that have made a mark successfully in 2020.

10 Best Live Chat Software Solutions

By the year 2021, 50% of organizations will spend more on the creation of bots and chatbots than developing traditional mobile applications, says a report by Gartner.

Many companies are letting live chat supersede their email support options. And for a few, it has been working quite well.

That alone should convince you of why your business needs a robust live chat software.

Other than that, the use of live chat software allows you to curate the ultimate customer journey and track them effectively too.

Now when you are sure about the benefits of this feature-rich and powerful live chat solution, how do you know which live chat for a website is going to be best suited to the needs of your business?

The questions to ask are:

• What features should you pay attention to?
• How do you not end up overspending?

So, if you are ready to start on your quest, here is our pick for the top ten best live chat software for 2020.

1. ProProfs Live Chat

ProProfs Live Chat software is one of the best live chat tools for websites as it provides real-time solutions to customers in seconds. This fast and easy-to-use live chat tool can be configured into any business website immediately. What’s more, it allows your support operators to get an edge since they can monitor visitor behavior on your website and initiate a chat during strategic moments.

Moreover, ProProfs Chat enables you to design highly personalized chats with visitors that increase engagement and peaks interest instantly. As a live chat option, ProProfs also offers the option to create a complete support suite as there are more than 50+ integration options available.

This comprehensive platform provides you the option for unlimited chats and transcripts, advanced customization, canned responses, and more even with its free plan. It is compatible with all types of browsers and operating systems, ProProfs Chat is an affordable live chat tool that is accessible across all Mac, Android, and Windows devices. No wonder ProProfs is one of the best options for our list of top live chat software to consider in 2020.

Features:

• Issue tracking
• Ticket management
• Email management
• Shared inbox
• Internal notes

Benefits:

• Have complete control over monitoring and tracking ticket assignments, prioritization and addressing them as per SLA guidelines
• Access a range of prefabricated messages and greetings from a template library that is time-saving during your customer conversations
• Boost sales through improved communication with prospective and existing customers by viewing customer messages before they are even sent

Pricing:

• Try any plan free for 15 days
• ‘Forever Free’ plan at $ 0
• ‘Essentials’ plan at $ 15 per operator/month
• ‘Premium’ plan at $ 20 per operator/month
• Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee

2. LiveChat Inc.

LiveChat is one of the competitive options, as it provides real-time support and service to your customers and visitors. Equipped with three primary elements including a web-based chat window, web-based control panel, and operator application offers cross-platform capabilities that enable your agents to log in and chat with visitors through any desktop and mobile devices.

Live Chat is a feature-rich tool with an array of functions that automates your customer service and helps you to close more deals. It provides real-time website traffic monitoring, dashboards, and statistics that help your business with your online sales and marketing, web analytics, and live customer care or support requirements.

LiveChat boasts of a global clientele as it has built trust and credibility as a live chat service provider over the years.

Features:

• Customer engagement
• Ticketing support
• Co-browsing
• Geo-tagging
• Data Security

Benefits:

• Converse and engage with your prospective and existing customers providing support directly from your website in real-time
• Share files and initiate integrations with third-party applications for CRM, email, content and eCommerce marketing
• Top of the line custom, standard or interactive reports, dashboards and analytics tools extracting valuable insights and encouraging global outreach

Pricing:

• 14-day free trial available on the ‘Team’ plan
• ‘Starter’ plan at $ 19 per agent/month
• ‘Team’ plan at $ 39 per agent/month
• ‘Business’ plan at $ 59 per agent/month
• Contact the vendor to get a customized quote on the ‘Enterprise’ plan

3. Kayako

From chatbots offering modern messaging experiences to placing the right content to your customers, Kayako has an impressive set of features and more. This makes it an ideal choice as a top live chat software for small businesses as well as medium to large-scale enterprises.

Kayako is an omnichannel solution that conveniently integrates with several external platforms enabling conversations to be handled and managed from several sources. Linking it with your CRM permits efficient workflow mapping which results in productive, high-quality experience for your revenue generation.

The live chat software by Kayako is mobile friendly and also works on all Android and iOS-enabled devices.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Assignment rules
• Organization profiles
• Custom views
• Custom roles and permissions

Benefits:

• Initiate conversions with prospective customers through effortless supporting and engaging them in real-time
• Proactively sell more by offering an instantaneous solution to their queries using a modern chat messenger from the business website or even iOs and Android applications
• Keep the conversation going even if the customer has left the platform by automatically sending messages to their email

Pricing:

• Try Kayako for 14 days on any plan
• ‘Inbox’ plan at $ 15 per agent/month
• ‘Growth’ plan at $ 30 per agent/month
• ‘Scale’ plan at $ 60 per agent/month
• Get a custom quote for ‘Enterprise’ plan by contacting the vendor

4. Zendesk Chat

You can make your business accessible to your customers 24/7 with Zendesk Chat, one of the top 10 live chat software of 2020. Strike up a conversation within minutes of setting up via an interface that is slick and enables interactions a breeze for your customers.

A feature-rich product with a polished AI-enabled chat console helps speed up the support process and improves customer satisfaction ratings as the desired result. Most importantly, you can make use of its strong data capturing capabilities to initiate behavior-based triggers, lead content marketing that elevates your communication with interested customers and markets to another level.

Features:

• AI-enabled chatbots
• Pre-chat and offline forms
• Triggers and chat routing
• Real-time monitoring
• Conversion tracking

Benefits:

• A unique screen-casting functionality allows customers to capture their screen and share it with the live agent to accurately communicate the error or problem
• Easily share files and images enable automated chats to be converted into tickets within a framework that is largely scalable across businesses
• Zendesk offers an out of box solution ideal for freelancers, small businesses, medium businesses, and large enterprises that require no advanced skill or techniques to operate the system

Pricing:

• You can try the ‘Enterprise’ plan for free, no credit card required
• ‘Lite’ plan at $ 0
• ‘Team’ plan at $ 19 per agent/month
• ‘Professional’ plan at $ 35 per agent/month
• ‘Enterprise’ plan at $ 70 per agent/month

5. Intercom

Boasting of 30,000 paying customers, Intercom is one of the best live chat software that is trusted across the globe. The plugin is all-powerful and was created specifically to boost sales because it can route leads to specific salespeople.

The software has been designed to continue the conversation, going beyond just live chat. The system keeps the messaging ongoing via email and targets contacts by their browsing behavior. It claims to convert your prospects into qualified leads resulting in an increase in revenues by 13% on the website.

And that’s not the end of the list. With Intercom smart bots, you can offer support round the clock, responding to some of the most common service-related queries in real-time. The focal point of the system is not just on that but also to promote lead generation, customer engagement, and customer support.

Features:

• Business messenger
• Outbound messaging
• Custom bots
• Conversion management
• Customer data platform

Benefits:

• Build personalized relationships with customers through a combination of bots and live chat, routing them to appropriate sales teams
• Introduce products by creating custom-designed content by segmenting customers and reaching out to them via triggering outbound emails
• Access smart automation and self-service promotion to customers and integrate it with external software like Slack, Zoom, HubSpot, and more

Pricing:

• You can try both ‘Start’ and ‘Grow’ plans for free for 14 days
• ‘Start’ plan at $ 39 for 1 seat per month
• ‘Grow’ plan at $ 99 for 5 seats per month
• ‘Accelerate’ plan at $ 499 for 10 seats per month on annual billing
• ‘Scale’ plan at $ 999 for 10 seats per month on annual billing

6. Acquire.io

A cutting-edge, multi-channel messaging platform, Acquire.io offers a one of its kind premium and free live chat software that makes service accessible to customers. The tool benefits support teams with more interactive, customized, and quick customer communications on your website. Plus, bots are strategically employed to onboard new customers by responding to commonly asked questions and escalating conversations to the appropriate teams and departments.

Advocating a collaborative theme via collective efforts in allowing your team to qualify, route, and convert web visitors before them bouncing off helps to minimize friction in the sales cycle. The platform becomes even more robust with key functionalities including screen sharing, voice call, co-browsing, speech recognition, call recording, and instant file sharing.

Features:

• Unified agent view
• Screen share
• Chatbots
• Integrate VoIP and SMS
• Reporting and Analytics

Benefits:

• Leave chat notes that include critical information for your teammates to review on conversations privately and then facilitate appropriate resolutions
• Save a lot of agent time and effort by using canned responses, auto-replies to commonly asked questions and deploying chatbots to resolve simple issues
• Support your live chat efforts by sharing content from the knowledge base to get them up to speed on simple issues at the click of a button

Pricing:

• Request for a customized proposal as the pricing model depends on factors specific to your team

7. Olark

Despite being one of the simplest live chat platforms to use and set up, Olark is a top live chat software that is very popular in the market. Showcasing a great user interface for both customers and businesses, the chatbots are easy and quick to set-up and functions like a charm, offering a seamless experience to your website visitors. That said, the focus still is very much on ensuring that customer conversions keep going up.

With advanced customization tools, Olark helps in jumpstarting messaging, personalizing discussions, and communications by adding the conversation tool on specific pages. Targeted messages can be sent automatically depending on the page that the visitor is currently browsing through.

Generate live chat reports in real-time that are not just limited to chat conversations but also measures customer engagements effectively. Comprehensive reports produced by the system can be used to scrutinize results and use them to make sound business decisions.

Features:

• Live chat transcripts
• Custom chatbox forms
• Team management
• Automation
• Security

Benefits:

• Make tweaks visually to ensure that your chat box matches with your brand generating trust and credibility among website visitors resulting in more chats, sales, and satisfied customers
• Extract actionable insights on product feedback and information about your customers by accessing chat transcripts archives
• Interact with customers in real-time and give something extra with PowerUp that boosts sales, growth, and customer service

Pricing:

• Free trial available for 14 days
• Get started on a $ 19 per agent/month plan
• Cancel at any time

8. Comm100

An intuitive user interface and a quick and easy implementation process demarcate Comm100 as a specialized live chat system from its competitors in the market. Heavy on features, the live chat tool has been designed to push customer satisfaction rates by interacting and engaging with clients in real-time.

Considered as one of the best live chat support software, it provides a top-notch messenger platform that suits businesses of all types and sizes. Make use of the bots to book demos and share the qualified leads with appropriate sales reps to convert them into hardcore sales. This level of automation along with working on collaborative team inboxes, targeted messaging all works in tandem to achieve greater standards of customer satisfaction.

Features:

• Proactive chat invitations
• Audio/video chat
• Website visitor tracking
• Pre/Post-chat survey
• Multi-language support

Benefits:

• Have absolute control over conversions by enabling real-time connections by tracking and identifying potential customers via live chat
• Boost your brand value and improve customer communication by addressing issues raised by existing clients
• Tweak chat buttons and post-chat rating methods and turn off functionalities when you do not need them

Pricing:

• Try a 15-day free trial
• ‘Team’ plan at $ 29 per agent/month
• ‘Business’ plan at $ 40 per agent/month
• Request a personalized quote for the ‘Enterprise’ plan

9. Freshchat

Again, a top contender in the top live chat software to consider in 2020, Freshchat is a live communication system that is modern, easy-to-use, and affordable. It drives organizations to leverage all of their customer conversations across domains like support, sales, or marketing to build long-term relationships with their clients.

Presenting a familiar interface, it highlights robust team collaboration with an intelligent chat distribution system. Moreover, agents can assign tags to the chat to segment conversations into appropriate categories, letting the right department to check out a chat session easily.

Comprehensive analytics and reporting balance the system that is desired by marketers, support, and sales teams across many industries. Configurable in all Android and iOS devices that enable your team to remain connected with customers from any location, and at any time.

Features:

• Auto routing
• Conversation history
• Ticket management
• Multilingual support
• Reporting and analytics

Benefits:

• Create custom forms to gather essential lead information before engaging them in a live chat conversation through pre-chats
• Get a sneak-peak into what your customer is typing and frame your responses accordingly even before the query pops-up on the window
• Track potential customer behavior and set lead conversion rules in place that helps qualify leads to appropriate agents and teams

Pricing:

• Try Freshchat on across plans – Sprout, Blossom, Garden, and Estate on a 21-day free trial
• ‘Sprout’ plan at $0 for up to 10 members
• ‘Blossom’ plan at $13 per team member/month
• ‘Garden’ plan at $26 per team member/month
• ‘Estate’ plan at $44 per team member/month
• ‘Forest’ plan at $67 per team member/month

10. Zoho Sales IQ

When your objective is to meet the needs of your customers instantly, your search ends with Zoho Sales IQ, a top 10 live chat software solution that immediately enables you to track visitors as soon as they land on your website. A great choice for businesses of all types and sizes, Zoho Sales IQ offers live chat support that comes with a clean, organized, and insightful chat window that is very easy to navigate.

The platform is equipped with customer support and sales intelligence functionalities that are capable of enhancing customer engagement even as you capture and summarize statistical data and insights. Most importantly, it eliminates the need for the business to integrate with additional third-party applications, ensuring a lot of cost savings.

The live chat software comes with dedicated apps for both iOS and Android platforms. This makes the system easily accessible from practically all types of devices that run with these operating systems.

Features:

• Screen sharing
• Chat monitoring
• Automatic chat translation
• Track visitors’ footprints
• Geotagging

Benefits:

• Close deals much faster by monitoring traffic in real-time and deliver outstanding customer service via your live chat platform
• Trigger sharp interactions by classifying leads as hot, warm, or cold prospects basis lead scores and visitor insights that converts your live chat as a lead generation machine
• Engage bots to automatically respond to first-level customer queries that also act as a channel to collect basic information such as name, email address, etc.

Pricing:

• 15-day free trial available on all plans – Free, Basic, Professional, and Enterprise without any credit card guarantee
• ‘Free’ plan at $0 for up to 2 operators per month
• ‘Basic’ plan at $13 for up to 3 operators per month
• ‘Professional’ plan at $42 for up to 5 operators per month
• ‘Enterprise’ plan at $92 for up to 10 operators per month

How to Choose the Best Live Chat Software?

Various live chat solutions claim to be the best in the market. However, the ones on the list are quite popular and have been selected based on their reviews and ratings available on different business listing sites.

But there are chances that you’d still feel confused and indecisive about which live chat solution should you opt for. Well to help with that, we’ve got a small checklist ready for you which will help you decide how to choose the best live chat software for your business.

1. Speed

To manage multiple visitors at the same time, the one thing that will help your operators is speed. That means the experience for your operators should be seamless and enable them to offer support faster to visitors.

2. More Customization

The live chat software option you choose must-have customization options. A simple chat widget customization won’t work. Make sure the customization option enables the white-labeling of the chat widget too.

3. Detailed Reports

You not only have to see how your operators are performing but also understand how your customers feel about your services. That’s why you need detailed reporting in a live chat solution. It would help you improve your services efficiently.

4. Mobile App

Make sure the live chat option you choose supports mobile app use too. It either comes with a mobile app or is mobile-friendly, thus helping your operators to offer support to customers no matter where they are.

5. Price

Yes, it would be a great relief if the software you choose fits within your budget. But what you need to see is if the pricing is justified for the number of features you get in a package. Doing this will help you identify the best live chat software solution for your website that meets your support needs at cost-effective rates.

Which Live Chat Software You Should Choose?

Over the last few years, several service providers have made an entry into the live chat software domain. Most are here to stay as statistics report that a whopping 73% of customers are inclined towards communicating via live chat platforms because they find it a more satisfying experience.

Frankly, choosing a vendor can be hard but let your business needs dictate your decision. Think about your top priorities and have a system of analyzing the pros and cons of each live chat software individually.

There may be instances of bad judgment. You may have to indulge in a little bit of trial and error before you make the final call.

And when you do strike the perfect balance, it is a marriage made in heaven.

For the time being, we have got you covered with leg work and research. The reviews on the top ten live chat software are here. All you need to do is to select your perfect match.

Top Image Credit: Andrea Piacquadio; Pexels

The post Top 10 Best Live Chat Software for 2020 appeared first on ReadWrite.

Customers have a lot in mind when they land on a website to purchase a product or service. Some expect to find the product they have in mind instantly, while others conduct thorough research before they purchase a product. Well, that’s not all. Some end up being fickle-minded and land with no product at all. Here is how to create an effective journey map for your customers.

Landing in the “no product at all” category makes it all the more crucial for marketers to study different customer-mindsets in-depth and learn how to create your customer’s persona.

That’s why experts recommend studying situations from the customer’s point of view; to anticipate what will be their next course of action. Only then can a marketer get answers to the following questions:

• What is the root intent when one is looking for a solution to a problem?
• Why did the customer choose your competitor over you?
• How did they feel for the first time after using a product?

It will allow you to create a message that instantly captures attention, and finally work upon creating a customer journey map. But besides answering these questions, you need to follow the steps below to create a journey map successfully.

Understanding Your Customers

Do you come up with a lot of questions when trying to understand your customers?

“What encourages my customers to buy the product?”

“Why do they hesitate about purchasing our product?”

“What concerns do customers have when thinking of purchasing the product?”

Well, these questions arise when you do not understand your customer’s personality as their journey begins with your brand.

But to know this, to answer your “how to create a customer journey map” question, you need to understand them in the first place. And once you know them well, mapping the customer journey also becomes simpler.

In this section, we’ll help you to understand your customers in four easy-to-follow steps. So, let’s deep dive now!

Step #1: Gather Key Data

Did you know that 68% of customers prefer version A to version B?

But you’d only know this if you understand who your customers are.

So, to understand customers, you need to gather crucial data about them. For this, use channels like:

• Landing page performance data.
• Customer support tickets received via help desk software.
• Incoming customer support chats.
• CRM data such as customer’s name, email address, products or services purchased so far, and so on.
• Search history of the knowledge base repository.
• Customer behavior data via an analytics tool.
• Current social media activities.

Such data allows your business to answer the questions mentioned above and, from there, help you customize and create a customer journey map.

Step #2: Speak With Colleagues

Another way to know your customers is to communicate with your co-workers who are in customer-facing roles every day. Communication with coworkers can include your support, sales, and marketing team insights on customer behavior during a product purchasing journey.

While sometimes it may seem to be a vague attempt, experience tends to help organizations understand customers better. Those who face customer requests every day would know:

• Your target audience better.
• How many stages should the customer journey be divided into?
• How customers might end up behaving during support, sales, or marketing process?

Step #3: Send Out Surveys

Capture qualitative and quantitative data via surveys to get a holistic idea of a customer’s mindset. For this, send out customer satisfaction surveys and even Net Promoter Score (NPS surveys — like qualaroo dot com) to see where your brand stands.

Plus, you learn whether the existing customers are satisfied with your services or not.

Basically, the more data you collect, the more clarity you get on customers. And thus, it becomes easy to build an audience persona. In addition to this, you get to create a seamless customer journey mapping process.

Step #4: Develop a Target Audience Persona

With all the data in hand, time to develop a target audience persona. You can create personas like:

• Customer motivations.
• Customer needs.
• Customer’s hesitation towards your products.
• Customer’s concerns related to the overall brand service.

It’s no guesswork; you can build viable personas with the quantitative and qualitative data you gather. Once you create these personas, it becomes simpler to reach out to your target audience with effective marketing campaigns that end up increasing sales.

Understanding What Customers Go Through

You’ve understood how to identify customers and what affects them when interacting with your brand. It’s time that you understand their pain points at a deeper level.

91% of customers who are unhappy with a brand will leave without complaining — this is important to note.

As a customer-oriented organization like yours, you wouldn’t like to see this happening with your customers. That’s why you need to work upon the next customer journey stage to understand what your customers go through.

Doing so will allow you to create excellent customer journey mapping examples for upcoming teams at work hassle-free.

Step #5: Consideration Phase

As you complete the process of creating a target audience persona, you should dive deeper to learn what all things do your customers consider before making a purchase.

Make a list out their concerns, such as:

• Is the service worth investing in?
• Do I need the product?
• What purpose will the product’s use serve me?
• Are there any consequences I need to be worried about?
• What if the quality isn’t worth my investment?

These help you create counter solutions that help you answer – what is customer journey mapping and how to simplify it further.

Step #6: Purchase Phase

As you map out this phase, you see the steps your customers take to complete the product purchasing process. Here your organization can identify the problem areas and provide solutions to improve sales.

Questions you should look into can be inclusive of:

• When did the customer lose interest in the product?
• Should we cut-short the check out process?
• Should we add a live chat to create upsell opportunities?
• Should we trigger help when we see an exit-intent?

Step #7: Retention Phase

Finally, track your retention strategies and monitor how many customers you successfully retain with their help. You’d learn about things that put your customers off and why they deviate from the purchasing process. This would allow your team to further upgrade existing strategies and actually retain customers.

Track what strategies worked out fine and which ones ended up losing more customers, only to refine the existing marketing and retention strategies.

In the End

It is important not just to understand the customers but also to carve their journeys with your brand. However, learning about their thought process is crucial for your business. That’s why you need to follow the aforementioned steps to:

• Understand your customers using:
  • Different mediums to capture crucial data on customers
  • Information collected through colleagues
  • Surveys like customer satisfaction or NPS
  • Target audience persona
• Understand customer thought process:
  • When they consider reasons for investing in your product or service
  • When they find compelling reasons to purchase your product
  • When they find your efforts impressive and helps your brand to retain customers effectively

Once understood, it becomes easier to come up with strategies that shape their journey with your brand. We hope these easy to follow steps help you create a customer journey map hassle-free.

The post How Do You Create an Effective Journey Map for Your Customers? appeared first on ReadWrite.