For your business to generate more sales, you must first learn how to attract and retain customers. However, the process of manually engaging customers isn’t only time-consuming but takes up more human effort than you have available at the moment. What you need to help you out are the best customer engagement tools around.
This software automates part of the engagement process so you don’t need to be as hands-on as much.
To make the search easier for you, we’ve made a list of the best customer-engagement tools for business. These customer-engagement services will help you cultivate better relationships with users while giving you insights on what works for them or not.
Why Is Customer Engagement Important?
User engagement goes beyond talking to your customers. It’s also about gathering customer information that can help you improve your business.
And here’s the thing: Customers who want to share their experiences represent a 23% premium in terms of profitability and revenue over the average customer, according to Gallup. So, it’s very important that you provide them the means to share their feelings about your company and products.
Customer engagement also informs you if there’s anything wrong with your marketing funnel. You’ll know at what point they drop off in the sales funnel and why they’re doing so.
Remember that the more customers understand your business and products, the more likely they are to push through with the sale. Thus, you need to provide touchpoints where customers can engage with your brand.
The Usual Mediums for Customer Engagement
So, how do you get in touch with customers, you ask? There are different ways to do it.
Here are some of the most common:
- Social Media Sites — Monitor brand mentions and listen to what people say about your products and services across different social platforms.
- Short Message Service (SMS) — Some people still use SMS to communicate with customers. And some companies specialize in sending SMS to a list of users. A possible downside is that people aren’t that keen on giving away their phone numbers.
- Surveys — Get feedback from customers after they perform a desired action on your site.
- Emails — Send ad hoc campaigns or launch automated emails as part of your sales funnel to help turn leads into customers.
- Forms — Request people to ask their questions or raise concerns about your business using your form.
- Live Chat — Set up a widget on your site that visitors can use to provide feedback or ask questions in real-time.
- Push Notifications — Give visitors a chance to receive notifications from their desktop or mobile device about updates on your site.
- Chatbots — Similar to live chats, except that chatbots make use of AI technology to provide answers, thus requiring less human intervention.
- Knowledge Base — Collection of guides that a customer will need to use your products properly.
When choosing a tool, keep these mediums in mind. Think about what mediums would work best for your business and customers. Some would prefer to have chatbots over push notifications, for example.
Customer-Engagement Tools for Businesses
Here’s our list of the best customer-engagement tools available for small to large businesses. Most of these will work for small businesses that are looking to expand in the near future.
1. Wistia
Wistia is a video-hosting platform that analyzes how your audience interacts with your videos and podcasts. It also has a bunch of lead generation tools that can help you engage your customers.
For example, it can collect your customer’s email addresses right from a video. This can help you expand your mailing list. You also can use it to add a call to action to send customers to a separate product or landing page.
2. Drift
Drift uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help you with your marketing, sales and customer communications. To be more specific, you can add a live chat feature on your site and interact with customers through bots.
There also is a feature where you can convert static forms into conversational forms. That means when a qualified lead submits a form, they can chat with a sales representative right away.
In addition, there are virtual selling assistants that can answer users’ frequently asked questions on your behalf. You can reroute email replies to a specific person based on what information your customer needs, too.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk provides customer service solutions such as chatbots, online help centers and community forums. The aim is to introduce automation and AI functionality to a site to help you engage your customers in a conversation.
This customer engagement software even lets you add your team to the system so they can help you build out your system. It also makes it possible to engage your customers from a central location.
4. Twilio
Twilio is a customer-engagement software that shows the importance of potential customers through its multichannel notifications.
With Twilio, you can also send SMS notifications to almost anyone in the world (it covers 150 countries). You also can send push notifications on iOS and Android devices. It supports web push notifications as well.
5. Airship
Airship makes reaching out to customers at every step of a customer’s life cycle possible using its push notifications, email, SMS and in-app messaging feature.
It can help you acquire new leads for your business, keep them engaged once you have their attention and expand your business by finding new growth opportunities.
Airship also has analytics features that help you take steps based on how users interact with your business.
6. Upland
Upland focuses on mobile marketing and analytics. If your primary focus is on engaging customers on their mobile devices, this might be the right customer-engagement tool for you.
Using its location-based targeting, you can deliver breaking news or send personalized content to your audience. In addition, you can use it to promote deals and new products. It also has onboarding tools to help you explain your products and services.
7. Typeform
Typeform allows you to get a user’s contact information through beautiful forms.
Unlike conventional approaches, this lead-capture software asks questions as if customers are having a conversation using conditional logic. This makes the process more engaging, which hopefully results in higher completion rates.
Instead of starting from scratch, there’s also an option to use templates so you can build and deploy forms in minutes. All you need to do is just add your questions along with images and videos if necessary.
8. SurveyMonkey
Through the years, SurveyMonkey has given users the ability to create quizzes, surveys and polls with relative ease.
However, it has grown to provide data solutions to help businesses gather insights on all fronts.
Aside from launching customer satisfaction surveys to know what your audience wants and needs, you can also use SurveyMonkey to get insight into how your employees are feeling to help you improve your operations.
There are other features, too, like being able to use your mobile device to capture customer information during events. You can also let customers grade their experience with your customer service team.
9. Checkbox
Checkbox provides survey software that lets you create and share white-labeled and mobile-responsive surveys to your audience.
You have the option to set permissions to limit access to your survey. But you can leave it public so that everyone can see it.
Using Checkbox’s automation features, you can streamline your process more efficiently. It will perform some of the tasks that you’d normally have to do manually by introducing trigger alerts and API.
10. Google Forms
If you’re looking for a free way to collect information from your customers, you can’t go wrong with Google Forms. It is a great way to get basic feedback about your business from your desktop and mobile devices.
Google Forms also has analytics features so that you can stay on top of all the data that you managed to collect. You can then export data to other Google products like Docs and Sheets to help improve your workflow.
11. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one customer-relationship-management software service for businesses of all sizes. It offers a mix of free and paid features aimed to help you grow your business through sales, marketing and service software support.
You can create forms, landing pages and live chat to generate new leads and automate your email marketing efforts. Its in-app calling and call tracking features allow you to accommodate business phone calls.
Other customer support features include ticketing, team email, templates and ticket creation bots. Those that register to higher plans can create a knowledge base and run simple automation.
12. Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage is a subscription service that lets you engage with the right customers through behavior tracking and automated marketing campaign creation.
Using Marketo Engage, you can create responsive emails easily using its visual editor. And if you’d like to test out your email designs, there is an A/B testing feature.
The Marketo Moments app allows you to check your email marketing performance while you’re on the go.
13. Klaviyo
Klaviyo can help you build your email list using flyouts, pop-up messages and forms.
You can make the tools show to site visitors according to their profile, segment, referral URL, or physical location. Using Klaviyo, you can show specific forms to first-time visitors, frequent shoppers, your best customers and more.
The Klaviyo Form Builder helps you understand your audience better based on the customer data you collected. It will track your customers’ product preferences, shopping habits and other data, such as when they’re planning to make their next purchase.
14. Constant Contact
Constant Contact focuses on helping you engage more customers through email campaigns.
It lets you send a welcome email to new subscribers, triggered email series, contact segmentation, resending emails to those who failed to open the first email and list-building tools.
You can also drive more business using Constant Contact through live events, donations, surveys, coupons and other means.
Other features include creating a website or an ecommerce store, promoting your business on Facebook and Instagram and responding to comments and messages via its social inbox.
