How to use customer communication tools for enhanced engagement and sales
It’s a competitive world, e-commerce – but customer communication tools can help you make an impact.
If you’re hoping to boost audience engagement and sales, there’s nothing that matters more than getting your messaging and customer interaction spot on.
This article explores how customer communication software can help you achieve this, and suggests several solutions to consider.
Why use customer communication tools?
Effective communication with customers is the bedrock upon which you build your business.
And while professional communication skills are a must for anyone who hopes to thrive in their career, individual talent alone isn’t enough when it comes to the complex world of customer interaction in the e-commerce sphere.
The reason is that the modern marketing ecosystem is so vast that it can be a little overwhelming at times.
Customer communication management encompasses everything from dealing with customer queries by email, through monitoring chat tools, to updating social media platforms and much more besides.
It’s a lot. This is why using robust tools that are specifically designed to simplify customer conversations is essential for any e-commerce company looking to boost engagement and supercharge those sales figures.
The importance of customer communication tools in e-commerce
You can craft the perfect product descriptions for your offering, but you also need to make sure potential customers have the opportunity to read them.
Deploying the right customer communication software can help you achieve that.
But that’s not all. Here are more benefits you’ll see when you start using communication platforms that are a good fit for your business:
Understanding your customers
First, these tools can help you understand customer expectations and behaviour. Getting to grips with the typical customer journey will give you a head start when it comes to delivering what your customers actually want.
For instance, if you find that one of your social channels is underperforming in terms of lead generation, it’s important to work out why so that you can tweak your social media marketing efforts.
It could be that your customer messaging isn’t quite landing properly because there’s a mismatch between the message and the platform demographics.
Dedicated social tools can help you analyze how best to optimize your communication strategy in each channel to maximize engagement.
Finding the right audience
Sometimes, finding the right audience in the first place can be tricky, particularly for businesses just starting out.
It’s crucial to focus on communication channels that deliver concrete results and truly valuable leads, because that’s how you foster lasting customer relationships.
This is where the power of analytics comes in.
You can do a deep dive into your existing customer data to better understand who your offering appeals to. Based on this, you’d then begin to build more accurate buyer personas to make it easier to target your messaging more effectively.
Assuming you have a large enough customer base, you can also use platforms such as survey tools to seek out valuable feedback to help shape your future strategy.
Boosting customer loyalty through personalization
A personalized experience is a more memorable one. But personalization means more than simply sticking each customer’s name at the top of an email header.
A truly personalized service is one that you tailor precisely to each customer’s preferences.
Sending genuinely personalized emails involves selecting the right information and sending it at the right time. And if you want to know how to do that, it means putting tools in place that will generate in-depth insights from your website and social media analytics.
Improving customer service
Analytics platforms are a great starting point for improving customer service in general, but there are plenty of other communication tools that will give you an edge here as well.
For instance, it’s vital to keep track of how your customer support team is doing by tracking customer-centric metrics.
Let’s imagine you discover that the call abandonment rate in your call center is increasing. That’s a definite sign of a customer care problem that needs fixing.
It could be due to some issues including a lack of trained staff or even too much reliance on complex interactive voice response menus.
Whatever’s causing it, you can use the advanced features in your communications platform to diagnose the problem and fix it as quickly as possible.
Increasing productivity via task automation
Maximizing productivity in every way possible is a major strength of customer communication tools.
One of the best aspects of these solutions is that you can use them to automate time-consuming marketing tasks, leaving your staff free to focus on more important work.
You can schedule personalized emails, and social media posting, and optimize lead generation with just a few clicks.
Meanwhile, you can get on with the equally important human side of customer relationship management.
Customer communication in practice: five categories of tools to consider
For most e-commerce stores, focusing on customer communication is likely to have a bigger impact on engagement than the name of the website.
Here’s a list of five types of customer communications tools that often work well to increase customer engagement in e-commerce.
1) Unified contact center solutions
Call centers have been the mainstay of customer support and sales efforts for decades, but times are changing.
With the advent of cloud-based software, it’s now possible even for relatively small companies to access sophisticated client communication software tools that provide multiple telecommunications options in one unified platform. This can include:
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Phone calls,
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Video calls,
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Messaging channels,
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Video conferencing,
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Chat widgets.
Not only can these platforms help with the vital business of call center management, but they can give team collaboration a boost as well.
One of the terrific aspects of this kind of tool is that they tend to come with a variety of pricing options to suit different budgets.
You can either opt for basic services with a fairly low rate per user per month, or highly feature-rich versions for enterprise clients that negotiate custom pricing deals.
2) Customer feedback and survey tools
Collecting customer feedback is the best way to understand what you’re getting right and where you could be performing better.
Some tools are more geared towards collecting contextual feedback and others towards enabling you to craft complex questionnaires or tracking customer sentiment to derive more in-depth insights.
But you certainly won’t be short of choice. You’ll be able to gather feedback in many ways including:
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Pop-up surveys,
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Emailed feedback forms,
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Sentiment analysis,
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AI-powered analytics,
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Embedded polls.
In other words, there’s a wide variety of ways to learn more about your customers’ experience.
With Jumpseller, you can pick and choose the best tools to build trust and credibility in your brand: from Facebook Reviews to other reliable and easy-to-use integrations.
3) Push notification tools
Push notifications are useful for all kinds of elements of customer interaction, but they’re particularly good for delivering personalized messaging. You can:
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Alert existing customers to new product launches,
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Offer special discount deals to boost re-engagement,
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Remind customers that they have something in their cart,
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Segment your customer base so they only receive relevant messaging.
You can deploy push notifications on your website or set them up to display via an app.
4) Chat-based communication solutions
Making a chat feature available can do wonders for engagement, but only if it works well. That means you need to tread a little carefully here.
Let’s face it, there’s nothing worse than a chatbot that doesn’t seem to be able to resolve your query.
So if you are going to offer a chat app, make sure you do it right.
Many companies find a mixture of chatbot and human chat support teams works best to minimize response times.
Chat tools often provide advanced features such as intelligent chat routing to help direct incoming chat requests to the right agents.
You can also leverage the social media presence of your brand by utilizing it as a communication channel to interact with customers. For that, apps made available by Jumpseller, such as Facebook Live Chat, are intuitive and suitable options.
5) Email automation tools
Email is still one of the most popular ways to interact with customers and keep them informed.
That’s because it’s a very direct medium that gives you an excellent level of control over your brand positioning and messaging.
That said, if you want to boost those open rates and get your customers more fully engaged with your emails, using email automation options that support integrations with your analytics and CRM tools is key.
This means you’ll be able to create targeted campaigns that generate many more leads.
To get started, you might want to take a look at Mailchimp or Zapier, two of the many automation tools supported by Jumpseller, which you can easily integrate with your store.
Final thoughts: the power of direct communication
Effective communication with your customers is essential if you want to make a success of e-commerce. And given the proliferation of customer communication tools now available, you’ll be spoiled for choice.
Whether you want to get into A/B testing your content or you’re more focused on implementing customer feedback to upgrade your product offering, there’s a solution out there for you.
Why not take advantage of a few of these modern software marvels to take the performance of your business to the next level?
