Differentiated marketing is a strategy that involves a company creating marketing campaigns that appeal to two or more segments of theirtarget audience. It helps companies improve brand recognition, reach a wider audience, meet customers’ needs, and increase revenue. Nowadays companies use various strategies to reach customers and achieve their goals. There are three main marketing approaches: differentiated, undifferentiated, and concentrated marketing. To start, let's dive into the advantages and disadvantages of differentiated marketing and then take a look at several examples. Advantages and Disadvantages of Differentiated Marketing Before launching any marketing campaign brands determine their target audience. Based on the offer they have for their customers, companies segment their audience according to common characteristics. Afterward, they communicate their offer and message to the selected segment to drive conversions. To create an effective campaign, each company selects the most relevant target market strategy, among them differentiated marketing. This strategy has the following advantages: the opportunity to clarify the actual needs and expectations of your customers; the chance to choose clients based on your brand's capabilities; offering the appropriate products to the right people; exploringthe market and the position of your competitors within it; efficient use of company resources; increased revenue; fulfilled needs of customers. However, as with any marketing strategy, differentiated marketing has its cons too. Some of the disadvantages of differentiated marketing include: increased costs on advertising to reach each market segment; customers may respond differently; limits in your business growth that may occur when targetingsmall groups of customers; a high level of competitionamong companies that provide consumers with products at a lower cost. Now that you know the details of a differentiated marketing strategy, let’s find out the difference between the two target market strategies. Differentiated Marketing vs Undifferentiated Marketing When a brand creates campaigns for two or more segments of their target audience, it implements differentiated marketing. By targeting customers with certain common characteristics, companies manage to meet the needs and requirements of clients by providing them with relevant offers. Differentiated marketing is a great fit for wholesale and retail businesses since they can reach different segments of the audience. When using this strategy companies rely on various promotion channels giving preference to platforms that meet customers’ needs. By doing this, brands are able to deliver more personalized messages and an exceptional experience. The strategy helps resonate with the needs of each segment and obtain loyal customers who will eventually recommend your brand to friends and colleagues. Unlike differentiated marketing, undifferentiated marketing appeals to a wide range of people. Its main goal is to reach the maximum number of customers with one product, one price, one placement strategy, and one promotional campaign. In this strategy, the image remains important. Brands focus on quality, affordability, or a certain feature of their product. By providing customers with the best quality, brands aim at gaining a competitive advantage. Undifferentiated products usually have a wide customer base. By using this strategy brands try to show that they offer products that people need in their everyday life. For example, personal care products. The advantages of undifferentiated marketing are recognition, getting a larger reach, and no need for research or specialized criteria of a specific campaign. So now let’s jump into a differentiated marketing strategy and the steps necessary to create it. Differentiated Marketing Strategy By using this marketing strategy, a brand can create several campaigns that communicate a message to at least two segments of their audience. Let’s take an accessories store, for example. It could create an email campaignto promote a limited-time offer and appeal to people in different countries and cities, or clients from different age groups. With this approach, your company can target even more segments. Shoe brands often develop marketing campaigns that aim at not only men and women but also customers from various age groups. Besides, companies can create different messages in the same campaign to reach various segments. To create this target market strategy, consider several steps: Determine your target audience. The most essential step is to define who your main customers are. For this purpose, you need to single out the main traits of your customers such as their age, location, gender, marital status, employment, income, and all the necessary information that can help you segment them into groups. Define the unique needs of your customers. With the help of surveys, for example, find out what products your customers prefer and what services help them deal with their problems. Additionally, use analytics tools to track your consumers’ buying habits to figure out which products they purchase regularly. Create offers for different segments. Now that you know the needs of your customers, it’s time to provide them with your unique offers. For example, imagine one of your target segments prefers to purchase organic food. Keeping this in mind, and you can develop a special offer for this segment. Identify the promotional channels you want to use. To reach your customers, you need to select the appropriate ways to promote your products. For example, if your target groups most often use social networks then give a thought to developing promotional and advertising campaigns for social media channels. Developing this strategy requires following the steps above. To see a differentiated marketing strategy in action take a look at several examples. Examples of Differentiated Marketing The options for effective differentiated marketing are endless. Check out these examples to grab some inspiration. Let’s look at Lilly Pulitzer, a famous beachwear brand. In 2015, the company cooperated with Target to launch a more affordable line of clothing, cosmetics, and other goods. By providing customers with more affordable prices at more locations, the brand was able to drive demand, and acquire newloyal customers. Let’s imagine a running shoe brand. The company specializes in designing sustainable sneakers from recycled and renewable materials forathletes who care about our environment. Additionally, they produce performance models of running shoes with less cushioning for those who are concerned with speed. It demonstrates that the company divides customers into segments to fulfill each consumer's unique needs. For example, imagine a new hotel was opened. The hotel targets families with children. To satisfy the needs of their visitors, it provides parents with a special area designed for their children to play different educational games. Also, hotel residents can find a garden with custom-made swings for children. Moreover, it also allows people to bring their pets. For this purpose, the owners designed special pet-friendly rooms. By doing this, the hotel tries to target different segments. Let’s take a ski resort, for example. They decided to create a promotional video to attract more clients during the bulk season. To target two segments, marketers created two promotional videos: the first one shows young people snowboarding, in the second one shows families skiing. Therefore, using both ads, this ski resort can appeal to younger and older people. Differentiated marketing is a widely used strategy that helps companies reach different target markets and increase revenue. By creating differentiated campaigns, brands meet the needs of different segments.

Demand generation is using inbound marketing to create interest in a specific product and boost brand awareness. It helps companies generate more qualified leads and revenue. In this article, we’ll unveil why demand generation is important and how it works. We’ll also compare demand and lead generation and cover 8 effective strategies. Why is demand generation important? Each company develops marketing and sales initiatives that impact the stages of the sales funnel. This way, brands strive to create awareness of the product they sell and show customers its value, and drive interest. Once they succeed in communicating their offers, businesses can create demand for their products. Their target audience will be aware of companies’ perks, their teams will have a longer list of qualified leads, and their owners will have higher profits. By creating interest among your target market, you can obtain a strong position. With demand generation, your team will focus on prospective customers and their needs. You’ll ensure seamless communication with potential clients, optimize interaction with them, and identify their pain points. As a result, you’ll be able to solve problems. Now that you know why demand generation is important, it’s time to figure out how it works. How does demand generation work? To make your demand generation strategy work, you need to complete several steps. First of all, you should create a consistent brand with a clear voice, style, branding, brand personality, and messaging across different communication channels. Every piece of content you publish on your website and social media should comply with your brand values. Secondly, work in hand with your sales team to align all your marketing efforts. Make sure to include a visible call to action button on your website so that your prospects can make the desired action. Your company should have an accurate buyer persona to meet the needs of customers. Identify their pain points to solve problems quickly. Many businesses leverage special software to reduce the number of tasks during the demand generation process. Once you implement your campaigns, analyze the results. Since demand generation is data-driven, you should pay attention to the effectiveness of your offers, messages, and conversions. Now that you know how demand generation works, it’s time to proceed to the next section to make the difference between demand and lead generation clear. Demand Generation vs Lead Generation Since there’s only a slight difference between demand and lead generation, we’ll review each of the terms in detail to see their features. Demand generation is a marketing strategy that encompasses businesses using inbound methods to reach new markets and communicate their offers. It enables brands to boost awareness and trust and educate potential customers about products. With demand generation techniques, marketers can make more people aware of the product and its benefits and generate customers’ interest. Lead generation is a process of nurturing prospects to convert them into customers. Marketers collect contact information of potential customers through lead generation forms, email campaigns, and lead capture forms. Companies provide users with various incentives and content in exchange for their contact information (emails, names, phone numbers, etc.). Demand generation focuses on making people aware of the company and generating interest, while lead generation aims at converting leads into customers by gathering contact information. The difference is clear, so we’ll cover 8 effective strategies. 8 Effective Demand Generation Strategies There are many ways to hook the audience’s attention and drive their interest in your product so that they want to purchase. We’ve prepared a list that consists of 8 effective strategies to boost demand for your product. Implement blogging. Quality blog posts are the source of helpful information in which customers can find solutions to their problems. Blogging is one of the marketing strategies that help drive traffic to your website and social media platforms, convert prospects into customers, build trust, and encourage customer loyalty. Conduct webinars. Real-time conversation with potential customers allows you to share the necessary content and provide information about your product. During the registration, participants provide you with contact information. You can use this data to complete your buyer persona and reach prospects through available channels. Create podcasts. Podcast marketing is increasingly popular among companies now. You can use paid ads on famous podcasts or create your audio to educate people about your industry and product. Once you succeed in making quality audios for your brand, you can establish personal connections with your target audience, generate traffic to your website, have a wider reach, and build brand authority and awareness. Upload educational videos on social media. A short informative video always catches the eye of a customer. If you manage to develop great videos to inform people about your product and communicate your main message, you can increase your customer base. With visual content, customers will remember you and recall your brand in the future. Consider email marketing. Since there are around 4.3 billion email users worldwide, to your leads. Email marketing is a traditional yet effective way to reach your potential customers at the right time, collect feedback, generate traffic, and increase sales. Run social media campaigns. Once you identify the social media networks your target market prefers, use them to connect with your prospects. Make use of paid ads to target potential customers, conduct engaging campaigns to encourage the use of your branded hashtag, and consider influencer marketing. Chatbots enable you to run your campaigns on the necessary social media networks. With LIKE.TG, you can have a wider reach by implementing our chatbots in messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Instagram. Collaborate with influencers. You can consider influencer marketing so that an opinion leader can endorse your product to followers. This way, you can boost brand awareness, reach more people, increase sales, and gain credibility and trust. Offer free tools. You can encourage customers to register with your service to try it by providing a free tool. If people enjoy your tool, they will recommend it to their friends. As a result, your reach will expand. Use our strategies to make your demand generation effective. Hope that our information will come in handy when you decide to improve your business.

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a platform that empowers companies to buy advertising inventory and manage it by using one interface. It helps control multiple ads in real time, monitor, and improve their performance. Companies try to optimize their advertising processes to reach theirtarget audienceproperlyand get the desired result. The process of buying and selling ads has become even easier with the help of DSP. In this article, we’ll unveil how a demand-side platform operates, discover the difference between a DSP and a supply-side platform (SSP), and see several examples. How does a demand-side platform work? If you implement demand-side platforms, you don’t need to pass through some additional independent networks since these platforms operate without their help. For example, in case you leverage Facebook Ads Manager, you can buy impressionsdirectlyon Instagram or Facebook. DSPs allow media buyers to purchase display, audio, and video ads, analyze, and manage them on various networks by using a single platform. First of all, platforms provide adbuyerswith information about ad purchases from a publisher. The systems don’t imply buying ads directly from publishers or owning them. Companies should be aware of the fact that DSPs connect with SSPs via ad exchange to decide on the details of an impression. DSP has to bid higher for the impression if it’s a marketing manager who has already visited a company’s website. Now let’s make the difference between DSPs and SSPs clear. What is the difference between a demand-side platform and a supply-side platform? The key difference between a DSP and an SSP is that they network with the different parts of the programmatic ecosystem. The first service is leveraged by companies, agencies, and publishers to manage the purchasing process of ads. Using a DSP enables companies to reach different publishers from a single platform. The second platform is used to optimize the selling process of ad space. With an SSP, ad sellers can reach a bigger number of buyers through different ad exchanges. Now let’s jump into several examples. Examples of Demand-Side Platforms Amazon Advertising Platform Choozle Facebook Ads Manager If agencies, publishers, and brands manage campaigns through different networks, DSPs help control everything by using a single dashboard. This is one of the reasons many brands turned to the following platforms for help. Amazon Advertising Platform As an advertiser, you would probably like to reach new audiences and obtain more customers. With Amazon DSP, you have a great chance to buy advertising at scale on Amazon and other websites to reach people worldwide. Choozle With Choozle, you don’t need to worry about campaigns at scale because you can run them smoothly. Businesses can easily optimize their digital advertising with the help of the service. You can access targeting tools to optimize your digital advertising and evaluate its performance on Choozle. Facebook Ads Manager Open Facebook for business to explore Facebook Ads Manager, a typical example of a DSP. It allows companies and individuals to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The service empowers advertisers to monitor the performance of their marketing campaigns and figure out the improvements to be made. To put it simply, DSPs allow businesses to simplify the process of negotiations between buyers and sellers of ads. As a result, advertisers can choose and purchase advertising inventory on a single platform. The service also empowers companies to monitor the results of each campaign by providing companies with reports and analytics.

Digital marketing is using different promotion instruments involving online marketing channels to establish customer relationships. In this video, Alex, a marketer at LIKE.TG, talks about ways to make your business more digital-friendly. Why is digital marketing important? If you still don't take advantage of doing digital marketing, you lose potential opportunities to acquire more leads and retain customers. With the correct strategy, digital marketing allows pursuing lots of goals. Benefits of Digital Marketing Wide outreach Lower cost compared to traditional marketing Easy to measure results Decreases the selling cycle Helps build brand loyalty Retains customers Stimulates sales To make use of these benefits, one should define the types of digital marketing to use. They are the channels at the same time. Each type helps achieve different goals, so while crafting a strategy, it should be taken into account. Types of Digital Marketing Search Engine Optimization Paid Search Social Media Marketing Email Marketing Display advertising Affiliate Marketing Search Engine Optimization This involvescreating useful and relevant content to rank high on the search engine results page. By optimizing your website or blog content, you get more organic traffic. This way, the page will have more chances to attract users’ attention. At the top is the paid search where you should pay per click. Under it, there are search engine results, click-throughs from which you get for free, and they make up organic traffic. When optimizing your website or blog, take into account both on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO It implies on-site optimization.Take care of the following factors. Title tag. It’s a clickable headline for each result in the search query. It is vital for both user experience and SEO, as it is a short description of your page content, which is helpful for web spiders and the users. To be displayed correctly, keep in under 60 characters. Don’t forget to insert the keywords into the title tag. Heading. It appears at the top of a page. Make sure that each page has only one heading, including your targeted keywords, and it should reflect the page content. URL. It should reflect your page content as well. Include targeted keywords, but don’t change your current URLs as they may have backlinks and carry both authority and traffic. Page content. It should correlate with the search query to satisfy the users’ needs. Make sure that your piece of content provides site visitors with the necessary answers. Google has specific algorithms to check whether your page is beneficial. Pageload speed. Google strives for the best user experience while searching. That’s why it ranks fast-loading pages higher in the search results. Internal linking. It’s important for both site visitors and search engines. Internal links mean that all the content on your website is coherent so that the users can find the answers to related questions. ALT text for images. An alternative text aims to provide with good user experience, as well. It’s visible for users when the images fail to load and help the crawlers understand what this particular image is about. So, the purpose of an on-page SEO is to help both the users and the search engines. If all the factors mentioned above are okay, search engines will index your page without much effort. Off-page SEO It aims to increase your website authority. It is achieved by getting high-quality links from other websites. The more relevant links you have — the higher your domain authority is. To build links, create valuable content, increase social media shares, and get into guest blogging. Keep in mind that Google penalizes for manipulating the page rank by buying links. Advantages of SEO It allows you to reduce costs spent on every engaged client. The achieved results will help you gain traffic for rather a long time. Disadvantages of SEO The result is not visible immediately. Increasing of clickthroughs will be in 3-4 months. If you have excellent skills in SEO, you may unintentionally re-optimize your website by stuffing too many keywords or creating the content for search engines but not for users. Paid Search This is sponsored advertising, where youonly pay if a user clicks on your ad, that's why it is also called "pay-per-click." Website owners choose a keyword that, as they think, will be typed by the target audience in a search engine and place a bid on it. PPC channels Google Ads Paid ads on Facebook Sponsored messages on LinkedIn Promoted tweets on Twitter Advantages of paid search Allows to get conversions quickly Provides with detailed statistics: you can find out which ads bring you income, which ones are loss-making, hence, remove them from the search engine results page Disadvantages of paid search Expensive Highly competitive keywords require higher bids Not easy to implement Customers' clicks do not mean sales Click fraud People tend to trust organic search results rather than paid ads Social Media Marketing SMM is establishing relationships with customers and gaining traffic via social networks. Every social site gives its high chances to attract new customers, promote your brand, and boost sales. Social media marketing channels Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Pinterest Google+ Advantages of SMM Cheap Makes it easier to develop relationships with the target audience Allows to conduct market research Disadvantages of SMM Nobody is immune to negative feedback Time-consuming ROI is difficult to define Email Marketing With email marketing, you can establish trusting relationships with the clients, build brand awareness, retain customers, stimulate repeated sales, re-engage the passive clients, treat each client individually.Discover more benefits of email marketing in this article. LIKE.TG allows you to get into email marketing without breaking a sweat. You are welcome to combine email, SMS, web push notifications, and Facebook campaigns for better performance. After the registration, you can send 15,000 emails to500subscribers every month absolutely for free. Use email to: Greet new subscribers Nurture leads with relevant content Notify about sales, top-rated items or articles on your blog Cross-sell and up-sell Keep customers informed about their order or shipping status with the help of automated email sending Re-engage passive clients Email is the cheapest way to promote your brand, so don’t miss a chance to use it for free! Display advertising Display advertising is a kind of pay-per-click advertising, shown on related websites. It aims to grow the target audience by appealing to visual perception, create brand awareness, and monetize the traffic. Advantages of display advertising Wide outreach An opportunity to display ads on thematic websites only due to several targeting types Great chance to build brand awareness Disadvantages of display advertising Expensive Click-through rate and conversions are lower Often ignored by users or even blocked Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing allows promoting goods and services on the Internet by paying money for actions that facilitate promotion and sales. Usually, the mechanism is the following: website owners create links, and after a customer clicks it to buy something, they get referral fees. It is a common practice in Amazon. Advantages of affiliate marketing Target audience growth Quick and easy income without much effort Disadvantages of affiliate marketing Website owners should spend much time to find conscientious partners with reasonable offers Partners may also deal with dishonest websites How Digital Marketing Works To illustrate the mechanism of digital marketing, remember the last purchase you’ve made. Suppose it was online. Try to recall all the stages you had come through before making a buying decision. Firstly, we usually look for reviews and testimonials. So, think over the websites which provide them. Then, we examine a particular site that gained the highest mark based on reviews and find it on socials. Meanwhile, don’t forget about SEO — it should be easy for users to find your website. Make sure that your product page answers all the questions a potential buyer may have. At this point, a user contacts you if they’re interested, and email marketing comes into play. It gives lots of opportunities to turn a user into a client. Offer a lead-magnet for a subscription. It may be a discount, free shipping, a check-list, etc. Get some useful insights from our blog on how to use lead magnets effectively. After subscription, greet them and share the most favorable goods or content that you’re proud of. Send triggered emails. They are sent automatically and based on subscriber behavior so that each user will be treated differently. Don’t be afraid. It’s not rocket science — LIKE.TG takes care of all the technical side of things. This is just an example of how digital marketing works. Indeed, it depends on the industry, type of business, target audience, and the buyer persona. How to Do Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing Strategy Analyze your current marketing situation Set the goals Work out a strategy Manage the workflow Before choosing a digital marketing strategy, make sure that you need it. Research to discover the number of your potential customers online. After that, choose the most relevant digital marketing channels. Certainly, you may combine them but don’t get into each one of them — find out the most beneficial types for your business. Now, it’s high time to plan a strategy. No matter which one you choose, the general algorithm is the following: Analyze your current marketing situation. First of all, assess what you have: your current business model, the essence of goals, competition, online presence, strengths, and weaknesses. This analysis will allow you to compare it with a new digital marketing strategy further and discover if the game is worth the candle. Set the goals. This is a crucial stage. Make sure that your goals are realistic, measurable, specific, assignable, and time-related. Decide upon KPIs to monitor and control the fulfillment of the purposes. Work out a strategy. It is a plan following which you’ll manage to accomplish your goals. Specify all the tactics and methods to do it, taking into account the period needed. Describe in detail how you’re going to attract new leads and move them down the sales funnel. Manage the workflow. Delegate the responsibilities among your team, hire the specialists if you lack them. Mind that every digital channel needs a person to be responsible for it. Correct and optimize your strategy on the go to avoid the pitfalls. Digital Marketing Tools SEO Paid Search SMM Email marketing Display Advertising Affiliate marketing SEO. To evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine optimizations, make use of MOZ, SEMrush, Screaming Frog. These tools will give you insights into your technical SEO audit, position tracking, ideas for increasing organic traffic, backlinks analytics, and more. Paid Search. It allows promoting your business on partner sites on sponsored listings. You can pay per click, pay per thousand, or pay per call. Create PPC campaigns with the help of Google Ads. SMM. The most popular tool is BuzzSumo. It allows us to discover the current trends, find out which type of content performs better and learn the influencers who share it. It’s a real helping hand to draw inspiration from while crafting a social media campaign. Email marketing. With LIKE.TG, you can bring to life all your plans. You can start from afree email service plan or web push notifications. You can send web pushes in LIKE.TG for free if your database is less than 10,000 subscribers. Combine email, web push, and SMS in one campaign for better outreach. Set automated email sending, and LIKE.TG will make your campaigns deliver. Display Advertising. AdRoll helps target the right users based on their behavior and boost sales. Attract new users, convert them into shoppers, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Affiliate marketing. CJ Affiliate helps publishers and advertisers connect to raise brand awareness and sales as well. Advertisers pay per lead, a phone call, or a site visitor. How to measure digital marketing success? Keep in mind that any digital marketing activity should be measurable; otherwise, you spend time and money in vain. Digital marketing KPIs Traffic by channel The number of website visitors Unique visitors Cost per acquisition Cost per lead Customer lifetime value Return on ad spend Time spent on a site Bounce rate Click-through rates Shares Follows Return-on-Investment I hope this article will prove to be useful. If you are not in digital marketing yet, start from email marketing. Start digital marketing

Direct competition is a market situation in which two or more businesses provide customers with the same product or service and have the same target audience. In direct competition, these two or more rivals often have similar price points. In this article, we’ll compare direct and indirect competition and review several examples. Direct Competition vs Indirect Competition Since people often misinterpret the two terms, we need to discover the difference. In this section, we’ll have a closer look at the direct and indirect competition and their distinctive features. Direct competition is a market situation in which two or more brands offer the same product and have the same target audience. They compete with each other to win customers’ attention and persuade consumers to purchase. For example, if you want to buy a smartphone that meets all modern requirements, you can consider Apple or Samsung, which offer phones with the same characteristics. When you want to eat a burger, you choose between the following fast-food companies: McDonald's, KFC, and Wendy’s. They are direct competitors because they offer similar products: burgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, ice cream, etc. Indirect competition is a market situation in which two or more companies offer different products or services yet can provide customers with a solution and meet their needs. An indirect competitor helps consumers reach the same goal. Indirect rival has a different approach to the target audience and provides customers with alternative products. For instance, if you want to have a coffee drink, you can go to Starbucks and buy one, or you can install UberEats and order an iced latte at a local coffee shop and have it delivered. Now that you know the main difference, let's look at several examples of direct competition from well-known brands. Examples of Direct Competition Every company has its direct competitors. You’ll probably recognize the well-established brands in our examples. Let’s explore their competitors in more detail. McDonald’s and Burger King McDonald’s is the most popular fast-food company not only in the US but also outside the country. The brand conquered customers with its quick, tasty meals and affordable prices. However, consumers’ tastes change, and new players enter the market. Although McDonald’s does its best to meet the changes in demand yet, people still strive to try something new. Burger King became McDonald’s direct competitor since it produced similar products and targeted the same audience. Their burger battle “Whopper against the Big Mac” is still severe. Coca-Cola and Pepsi The competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is an excellent example of a duopoly. These two big rivals dominate the market and don’t let anyone else in. They share the same product — soda-flavored cola and audience. Moreover, both brands have similar price points, so it’s up to customers to decide which one they prefer to choose. They create new tastes, develop new marketing strategies, and provide customers with zero sugar drinks to hook the attention of the audience and encourage them to buy. Boeing and Airbus Since the 1990s, these two manufacturers of jetliners have shaped a duopoly with their big market shares. Boeing and Airbus offer a wide range of products — aircraft with different capacities. However, their products are similar, so the companies fight for precedence. Now you’ll be able to identify the direct competitors of your business. Hope that our examples showed the features of direct competition.

Not only your email copywriting matters but the email service you've chosen matters, as well.The domain reputation of your email serviceplays a huge rolein your campaign's success.Using an email service with a good reputation allows your emailsto pass through spam filters without a sweat. How to Calculate an Email Delivery Rate Email delivery rates are calculated by dividing the number of emails sent minus bouncesby the number of emails sent. You should remember that the number of emails sent is not the same as the number of emails delivered because when you send mailings, some emailsmay have bounced. Bounces are emails that can’t be delivered to recipients’ inboxes. Email Bounce Classifications Hard bounce Soft bounce Hard bounce This happens when an email can't be delivered because the recipient’s address is invalid, or the email domain doesn’t exist. Find out more. LIKE.TG offers an Email Verifier for you to check your mailing list before sending a campaign. This tool detects invalid email addresses and removes them from your mailing list. As a result, you send emails to valid addresses and your email deliverability is high. Soft bounce This happens when an email can't be delivered because of one of the following reasons: the recipient’s inbox is full, your email is too large, or the server is down. Find out more. As an email marketer, you should always track the delivery rate of all your email campaigns. Your goal is to achieve a delivery rate of 95% or higher. If the delivery rate of your email campaigns is reduced each time, then it’s time to examine your mailing list. Maybe it has too many invalid email addresses. Also, pay attention to your subject linesand content. Perhaps they consist of words that ESPsusually block, equating these messages tospam. With our service, tracking your delivery rate is a simple process. You need to open your statistics report. LIKE.TG has a high reputation score, which helps increase the open rate of your email campaigns. Let LIKE.TG deliver your emails! Our sender reputation score is high, so there's no need to take extra measures. Send emails from LIKE.TG and enjoy high email deliverability. Register and send an email campaign! Try it for yourself with our free pricing plan for small businesses. If your mailing list has fewer than 500 subscribers, send up to 15,000 emails totally for free every month. Make use of marketing tools like personalization, segmentation, subscription forms, A/B testing, ready-made email templates. Enjoy them at no cost! Create an email campaign

A customer support chatbot is a chatbot designed to provide customers with instant answers, support them 24/7, recommend products, receive payments, and answer FAQs. A customer service bot enables companies to reduce the workload of their customer service agents, incorporate consistency, ensure instant answers, and secure payments. In the video below, Alex reveals 3 powerful ways to enhance your customer support with chatbots. Check it out! In this article, we’ll explain why you should use chatbots for customer service and how you can do it to improve your customer service. We’ll also unveil how to create a customer service chatbot with LIKE.TG and review three successful customer service chatbots. Why should you use chatbots for customer service? Business owners incorporate chatbots to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their customer support service. They help provide instant answers, assist customers 24/7, and make bookings. Companies can reap even more benefits after incorporating chatbots into their businesses. First of all, chatbots help you provide customers with instant answers on autopilot. You don’t need to involve your customer support agents in the process, and customers don’t depend on your business hours. Since the chatbot can function 24/7, your clients will receive responses and solve their problems in seconds. Secondly, bots enable you to reduce the workload on your team by replying to routine, repetitive questions. Your agents can focus on urgent tasks while your chatbot will handle the rest. The bot will be an excellent tool for managing FAQs. Thirdly, chatbots are cost-effective. Incorporating a chatbot is cheaper than hiring customer support agents to handle repetitive tasks and inquiries. You don’t need a team of professionals to reply to FAQs because you can delegate it to your chatbot. After paying a specific sum for a monthly or yearly subscription, you can create chatbots and improve efficiency. While bots handle FAQsб your customer support team focuses on more urgent and complex issues requiring their immediate attention. Now that you know the reasons for implementing a customer support chatbot, it’s time to unveil the best ways to level up your customer service with bots. 12 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service with Chatbots Incorporating customer support chatbots can help you improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this section, you’ll find some effective ways to use them for your business. 24/7 availability. With chatbots, your company will be able to ensure round-the-clock support. Since the work of chatbots is not tied to business hours, customers can turn to help at any time of the day or night. As a result, you’ll no longer have dissatisfied clients who waited for hours to get the responses of your customer support agents. Use bots to quickly manage repetitive tasks and issues related to the product or service without human intervention. Instant answers. Consider incorporating a chatbot to provide instant responses with effective solutions. The bot reacts to customers typing their inquiries very fast, so they’ll need to wait seconds or minutes to get their resolutions. Timely responses will help you improve customer satisfaction and customer retention. Multi-channel assistance. You can use chatbots for various channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and your website. You have no limitations on the channels and their number. Identify the preferred channels for your target audience and add a chatbot to them to ensure consistent support. By engaging with clients on different communication channels, you improve accessibility and customer satisfaction. Consistency of responses. Customer support agents' answers might vary and differ, while chatbots send consistent responses based on scenarios. This prevents human error and inconsistency that might lead customers to a dead end. That’s why we advise using bots to ensure standardized customer service and accurate and reliable information. Handling of repetitive tasks. Chatbot is a perfect solution for managing routine tasks like FAQs, order tracking, and basic issues. In addition, agents have time to handle complex issues. Consider assigning these repetitive tasks to your chatbot to improve the efficiency of your customer support. Improved customer engagement. Teach your chatbots to engage with customers conversationally and interactively, making their experience with your brand seamless. Clients will be happy to communicate with chatbots trained to provide accurate and polite responses. Feedback collection. Use chatbots as tools for feedback collection. You can gather feedback and information about customer interaction. This information will help understand clients’ preferences, common issues, and trends. Post-purchase support. Interaction with customers is essential to sell products and keep up with them after the purchase. Using chatbots for post-purchase support enables you to improve overall customer experience and help solve customer issues that emerge after the sale. The bot can also manage such things as order status tracking, returns, exchanges, product usage, etc. Handoff to human agents. If you want your chatbot to provide comprehensive customer support, consider enabling handoff to human agents. If your bot is unable to solve the issue, customers can click “Connect agent” and receive all the necessary assistance and answers. Integration with CRM. Consider integrating your chatbot into your CRM. After finishing the setup, you’ll be able to ensure seamless customer data access, provide personalized customer interactions, effectively qualify leads, streamline customer support workflows, and follow up with customers after they purchase. Customer data from chatbots will get straight into your CRM, making it unnecessary to do it manually. With LIKE.TG, there’s no need to change platforms to integrate chatbots with CRM because the service offers all the necessary tools for marketers. You can seamlessly use its CRM and chatbot builder. Multilingual support. If you have customers from different countries, consider providing multilingual support with your chatbot. This way, clients can express their concerns and problems more easily. They can explain the issue in more detail so your chatbot will be able to help.Onboarding. Since chatbots can guide customers through simple processes according to specific scenarios, consider using them for onboarding. The bot will help clients start using a product or service. It’ll help you provide your customers with clear and accurate instructions, and they will understand your product faster. In addition, it’ll reduce the workload on your team. Now that you know how to improve customer support, let’s create a chatbot with LIKE.TG. How to create a customer service chatbot with LIKE.TG? Many services help you create and manage chatbots, and LIKE.TG is one of them. Indeed, the platform has all the necessary marketing tools to streamline customer service processes and improve efficiency. In this section, we’ll unveil the process of designing a customer support chatbot with LIKE.TG in detail so you can use it as a guide. Creating a bot in the service is simple, so no coding skills or special knowledge are required. The intuitive interface will guide you through the process without the involvement of specialists. We’ll combine the tips and best practices to build a Telegram chatbot and ensure seamless customer service for your clients. Let’s start with the first step. Step 1. Connect your Telegram chatbot Register in LIKE.TG or log in to your existing account. Go to the “Chatbots” tab and click the “Manage bots” button. Your next move implies creating and connecting your Telegram bot. Make a new bot using @BotFather and connect it to LIKE.TG with a token. Once you finish this process, start building your chatbot flow. Check out the detailed instructions to easily create a Telegram chatbot in LIKE.TG. You can do the same for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Step 2. Add triggers Create triggers for your customer service chatbot. Think of the words that should trigger the flow and add them to your chatbot. When users type these words, they will launch the flow, starting with a welcome message. Step 3. Add a welcome message Imagine you are going to create a customer support chatbot for your business. You need to start creating your flow with a welcome message — this is where you’ll include your FAQ buttons and quick replies. Below, you can see an example of a welcome message for your business with quick buttons like “Product Catalog,” “Pricing,” “Blog,” “Knowledge Base,” “Other,” etc. We have two parts of our customer service bot welcome message. They have some quick replies leading to some basic and specific issues. You need to add and connect the “Flow” element to ensure that once users click one of the buttons, the flow will continue correctly. Step 4. Add various elements to your flow Drag and drop all the necessary elements for your flow from the left panel to your editor’s field. It will help you diversify your chatbot and provide users with all the information and steps. Below, you can see an example with the “Action” element that allows users to connect with your human support agents if users need some specific help chatbots can’t provide. Consider expanding your chatbot flow with images, GIFs, audio recordings, and other files. It’ll help make your bot more engaging. Check out these instructions for a more detailed guide to building a chatbot. Hope that LIKE.TG and this guide will help you create an outstanding chatbot that helps address customers’ concerns fast. Let’s check out some great chatbot examples to grab some inspiration for future help desk achievements. 3 Customer Service Chatbots Today, lots of companies implement customer service chatbots for multiple purposes. We’ll provide you with three excellent examples of chatbots that work and bring positive results for businesses and seamless experiences for customers. Let’s check them out. AirAsia — Flight Reschedule Refund Malaysian multinational low-cost airline AirAsia has a great chatbot for customer support. The bot manages multiple tasks and helps solve problems regarding flight changes, double payments, name amendments, flight refunds, flight status, flight delays, and others. Bo bot ensures that customers have all the necessary information provided. The chatbot helps instantly manage refunds, reschedules, and other changes to their AirAsia flights. It also sends all the necessary links for customers to access. Paula’s Choice — Order Status A well-known skincare brand incorporates a chatbot to help customers with order status, return policy, and product recommendations. The bot is straightforward to use. A user needs to choose one of the fast buttons to receive information about specific matters. If you want to check your order status, the bot will ask you for your order number and email to track the progress of your order, making the conversation personalized. Sharing information with customers only takes minutes. HM — Survey HM’s chatbot helps gather customer feedback. After interacting with its chatbot, users can provide information about their experience with a brand. This way, the company strives to improve various areas of its business, including customer support. Congrats, now you know what a customer support chatbot is and why it’s important. We hope that our best practices and LIKE.TG will help you create a helpful bot for your business and customers. Register in LIKE.TG now to develop your perfect customer support chatbot in minutes.

Demand analysis is the research conducted by companies that aim at understanding customer demand for a certain product. Businesses generally use it to determine whether they can successfully enter the market and obtain the expected profit. During this process, the management decides on cost allocation, production, advertising, pricing, etc. A new firm can easily figure out if there's a significant demand for the product they offer and receive information about the number of competitors, the growth of the industry, etc. Demand analysis techniques allow entrepreneurs to determine the main business areas with the highest demand. Low demand for a specific product indicates that it does not fulfill customers' needs and perhaps has little value for them. Some of the causes of low demand include the incompatibility of products with the market, poor digital marketing, competitors that offer better alternatives, etc. Why is demand analysis important? A company's success or failure depends on the ability to identify and satisfy customers' needs. In today'smarket, every business needs to understand consumer behavior and hold inventory accordingly. Demand analysis brings many insights essential for the decision-making process. After conducting research, companies obtain knowledge crucial for sales forecasting, product pricing, costs on marketing and advertising, financial decisions, and production. Let's take financial decisions, for example. The demand for a product affects the financial decisions of a specific company. Suppose there's a high demand for a firm's product, and it's constantly growing. In that case, it requires additional costs on the production of more products and quality improvement, advertising to reach more customers, and boosting the marketing team's capabilities. The pricing policy of a company also depends on consumer demand. Understanding the trend of customer demand helps businesses decide whether to increase or decrease the price of their product. If you aim to understand your leads and customers and succeed in your industry, demand analysis should be an integral part of your business. We've already revealed the importance of this process, so now let's take a look at its objectives. Objectives of Demand Analysis Evaluating customers' response towards a product Formulating a pricing policy Sales forecasting Establishing a production policy Any business can fail when they don't fulfill consumer demand. Hence, some of the decisions a company makes can be at risk. If your company aims to eliminate this possibility, you can use demand analysis to determine customer demand for a particular product. This process has several objectives. Evaluating customers' response towards a product.Gaining and monitoring customer feedback is vital if your goal is to see customers' reactions to your new product. This is a great way to find out whether consumers are satisfied with your goods or if there's still something you can improve. Formulating a pricing policy. You can set the prices after having analyzed the demand thoroughly. Understanding the trend of consumer demand allows you to quickly decide whether to increase or decrease the price for a particular product. Remember, companies can't set prices without understanding the inclinations of their target audience. Sales forecasting. It enables you to make informed business decisions and predict your company's performance. With a detailed analysis, you can estimate your future sales. Sales forecasting can give you insights and tips on managing your firm's cash flow, resources, and workforce. Besides the proper allocation of resources, it helps you predict sales revenue. Establishing a production policy. It enables you to define the gap between demand and supply. You can estimate the necessary number of raw materials to maintain the regular supply. Besides, your company can utilize resources to the maximum if your operations are based on forecasts. Now that you know that demand analysis can bring a lot of valuable data for your business success, let's review how to perform demand analysis. How to Do Demand Analysis Identify the market Assess the business cycle Create a product that meets a particular niche Define your advantage Determine your competitors To define whether a company can easily enter the market and obtain the expected profits, businesses use demand analysis that helps understand the customer’s need for a product or service. There are five steps to consider. Identify the market. The first thing you should do is to identify the market you would like to target with your new goods. For this purpose, firms conduct market surveys to receive feedback from customers about the product and understand the level of customersatisfaction. If clients demonstrate dissatisfaction with it, companies try to develop a product so that it meets the customer demand. Assess the business cycle. Once a market is defined, you can proceed to evaluating the stage of the business cycle. It has three stages. In the first, emerging stage, there’s high customer demand and a low supply of goods. In the second, plateau stage, the supply of products meets the market demand. In the third, declining stage, the demand for the products is lagging. Create a product that meets a particular niche. You need to create a product that suits a certain niche within the market. Develop your products so that they can meet the needs of your consumers. Also, customers should be able to distinguish your goods from competitors’ alternatives. Define your advantage. Developing products that can resolve customers’ problems allows you to create a sense of usefulness and increase demand. Let’s take iPods or iPhones, for example. These products increased the demand by entering the personal electronics market because they were perceived by customers as useful products. Determine your competitors. Define the number of your competitors and their market share. It depends on the stage of the business cycle you’re in. For example, in the emerging stage, you’ll have fewer competitors which will allow you to obtain a higher profit margin. To sum it up, demand analysis is an essential step before making any business decisions. Companies should understand consumer behavior that defines the demand for a specific product within the market.

Delivery errors are the reasons that your email campaign wasnot delivered. To investigate errors, you can view the statistics report. Common Errors withEmail Campaign Delivery "Temporarily unavailable" means that the sending failed because the recipient’s email server was unavailable or rejected the message. "Address doesn’t exist" means that the email address is not on the domain. This error happens because users may have mistakenly entered the wrong email address on the subscription form. That is why it’s best to use a double-opt-inform of subscription in which the subscriber confirms his or her desire to receive your mailings by clicking the link in the opt-in confirmation email. "Spam" means that the recipient’s server rejected receiving your email, equating it to be spam. "Mailbox full" means that the subscriber’s inbox is full and has no way to receive your email. In this case, resending can be done after three days. "Marked spam by user" means the user marked your letter as spam, and his or her email address will be automatically transferred to the list of consistently unavailable emails. LIKE.TG offers an Email Verifier tool that helps marketers remove invalid email addresses from their lists and keep an email deliverability rate high. Follow this step-by-step guide to verify your email addresses.

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that requirescollecting customers’data, analyzing the history of their interactions with a company, monitoring their behavior on a site, and tracking previous purchases. This allows brands to create targeted and personalized offers, increase sales, and improve user experience. In this article, you’ll get to know why data-driven marketing is essential, unveil its benefits, and learn how to implement it. Why is data-driven marketing important? Promoting and advertising the same product toyour entire audienceis a thing of the past. People appreciate brands that care about them, know what they like and dislike, and remember their preferences. By putting a customer at the center of your business, you decide to establish long-lasting relationships with your audience. Implementing data-driven marketingallowsyou to have a clear picture of your ideal buyer. You’ll discover your top-performing strategies, find out why some leadsdrop off, and manage to be at the right time and in the right place with the best offer. No more guessing games. Every marketing effort and campaign will be based onyourdata analysis results. Torecognize the opportunities data-driven marketing provides, let’s uncover its primary advantages. Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing To understand the way data influences yourmarketing efforts’ performance, we’ll compare the process of creatinga campaign to cooking. Both processes are a kind of art in a certain way. To cook a delicious dessert, you need fresh and high-quality ingredients— they make up 50% of your success. The secondcrucial step is following theingredient proportionguidelines.With marketing,it meanscollecting only the data that matters and ensuring its high quality and reliability. Now that you know the recipe for an effective data-driven campaign, let’sdiscover which benefits you can reap. Allocatingyourbudget more effectively. Marketers who try to use more channels and methods to succeed drain their advertising budget pretty quickly. As a result, they don’teven know which investments perform better. When implementing a data-driven marketing strategy, you will use an analytics tool thatcan help you keep a record of your expenditures, so you will see which strategies bring you more money and which are not worth your investments. As a result, youwill be able to distribute your advertising budget more wisely. Understanding your buyers’ journey. Since data-driven marketingrequires monitoring user behavior on your site and recording all of their interactions with your brand, you will learn which landing pages and calls to action perform better and where your leads get stuck and leave your site forever. By collecting valuable data, you willdiscover your clients’conversion path and act on this data to improve your campaigns. Analyzing your target audience. Your customers are so different. They live in different countries or even continents. They use different devices and channels to buy your product andtake different steps before they make a purchase. With all this data at hand, you can predict their behavior and create different selling scenarios. Crafting relevant offers. With the help of marketing and analytics tools, you can divide all users into segments by various criteria. This way, you’ll be able to create targeted messages for each group. You can take into account users’ previous experiences and design acampaignthey will love. Once you create several campaigns this way, you’ll manage toperform this task on autopilot. Improving user experience.If youdeterminewhy you lose leads and single out the problems they face when using your product, you’ll be able to eliminate all of these issues. As a result, you’ll improve users’ experiencewith your site. Increasing sales. Collecting customer data enables you to create targeted offers for different audience segments. This way, your marketing campaigns will be more relevant, and you’ll manage to sell more products. Now that you know how to boostyour sales with data-driven marketing, we’ll share some tips that will help you get started. You’ll also learn how to implement this approachwith LIKE.TG. Howdo you get started withdata-driven marketing? Implementing data-driven marketing requireslots of time and dedication and a data analyst in your team. There is no one-fit-all approach since all companies are different, but there’s a standard algorithm. Check it out below. Setyourgoals. Developing any strategycalls for defining your objectives first. You should understand what you want to achieve, as your goals predetermine the type of data you will collect. For example, if you aim to increase user engagement, you need to collect behavioral data. Mind that your goals should beSMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Gatherdata. We can divide this stage into two steps.First, you need to decidewhich type of data you need and collect it. Everything depends on your goals. If you want to have a clear picture of yourcustomers’ behavioral patternsand create a profile, you needtheir personal information. You can directly ask clients to share it. If you want to increase sales, you need to get more attribution data and define your data sources. They can include website analytics, social media data, transactional information, customer feedback, etc. You can get this data with the help of Google Analytics, inbuilt social media analytics tools, social media monitoring and listeningtools, your contacts’CRM cards, tracking pixels, customer service software, etc. Process the data. Now that you have some data on hand, you need to manage, organize, store, and analyze it. There are lots of tools that can help youdealwith these tasks. Choosing such a tool might be challenging, sodecide on yourdesirable features and pricing beforehand and see whether you need some learning curve to start using the service. Consider Google Data Studio, Google BigQuery, Kissmetrics, and Stitch. It will be great to choose a tool that can both process your data andprovide reports. Mind that the more data you collect, the more complex your system will be. Your chances of making mistakes get higher, so hiring a data analyst to implement data-driven marketing correctly is an excellent idea. Use the data. Now that you have collected and processed all the gathered data, it’s time to build a hypothesis and test it. This will require you to test your assumptions regarding a specific parameter. The purpose of this process is to find out if there’s statistical evidence that proves your belief. Evaluateyourperformance. To evaluate the results, you need to check your dashboards regularly. If your goal is to increase profitability, monitor your conversion rates and ROI. If you aim to increase brand awareness, track brand mentions, discussions, and impressions on social media. LIKE.TG allows its users to work effectively using the power of data-driven marketing. No matter which service you work with — email, web push, SMS, orchatbot builder—you can collect customer data and store it in the LIKE.TG CRM. Each contact card contains data about your client, the history of their interactions with your company, purchase history, and any other information you add. You can access it anytime and use it to move a lead down the sales funnel. Below you can see what LIKE.TG’s CRM contact cards look like. You cangather this data automatically via chatbots. Once a user makes an order,gives their phone number, or shares their preferences via a chatbot, this information will be stored in the system. You can also assign tags to segment your customers and provide them with personalized offers. Congrats, now you know the benefits of data-driven marketing,understand how to get started, and can use this approachwith LIKE.TG. Start increasing user engagement and sales right now!

A dedicated IP is a feature offered by an email service by which you can send out all your mailings from just one specific IP address. In this case, no other users will be sending emails out from this address. This will have a positive impact on the reputationof your mailings, as well as on the percentage of emails openedand the number of conversions. This is generally something that mailing list services provide for an additional fee, or it is activated for free at higher rates. In this video, you'll get to know the benefits of a dedicated IP address.

Deceptive pricing is a method in which traders use deceptive means such as “original”, “former”, or “regular” pricing quotes for the bulk of a season to mislead prospectsand customers into thinking that they’re paying less money for products. The Federal Trade Commission prohibits companies from using such deceptive practices towards consumers. 4 Deceptive Pricing Practices to Avoid Former price comparison Drip pricing Pressure selling Strikethrough pricing Nowadays, when market competition is high, brands resort to different methods to attract the attention of customers. This includes various methods of marketing or pricing practices to drive the interest of as many people as possible and thus increase revenue. Many of these methods are against the law and violate consumer rights. Such practices may be subject to enforcement action so it is critical to be aware and avoid them. We’ll consider the most popular practices to avoid when buying products from different brands. Former Price Comparison In this case, a retailer offers a bargain on certain items by informing customers that its price is lower than a previous one. The company proves that the product is "discounted" by placing the inflated former price to show the difference. Drip Pricing This practice means only a part of a product's price is advertised with the total amount revealed at the end of the purchasing process. Additional costs such as local hotel taxes, booking fees, or resort fees are often not included in the ad or “dripped.” This deceptive pricing practice is often associated with the hospitality industry: airlines showing the price of a ticket excluding some mandatory fees, hotels not including local taxes, etc. Pressure Selling Some companies use emotional manipulation, limited-time offers, and long monologues from sales reps to make people buy products. High pressure can help generate more sales and increase revenue. However, these manipulative steps are illegal and violate customers’ rights. Strikethrough Pricing Cross-out or strikethrough prices are presented in the form of pricing comparison to attract the attention of consumers. Saving is made in comparison to the manufacturer’s recommended retail price. Companies use strikethrough pricing to win more customers since they see a tangible reduction in price. There are many types of pricing practices that mislead customers into thinking that they obtain items for a lower cost. We've mentioned the most popular that you can see in everyday life. Now let’s find out how to fight these deceptive actions. How to fight deceptive pricing Sometimes you may overpay because of the deceptive pricing practices used by some retailers use. However, fighting back can feel impossible since these actions are hard to prove. As soon as you notice that some of the retailers are breaking the FTC rules, you can take several measures. Collect evidence. The first thing you need to do is to collect all sorts of evidence that indicate there was price deception. It may be anything that can prove the deception by the seller: advertising in a newspaper or magazine, a TV commercial, post on social media, etc. You need to get a recording, screenshot, or an article in the newspaper that supports your claim. Submit a complaint. As an option, you can file a complaint to the FTC, an independent agency responsible for consumer protection. You can submit it online by following the instructions or reach an agent by phone. Yet there is no guarantee that this organization will investigate your case and return your money if you’ve overpaid. Ask for a refund. If a company acted unfairly towards you, as a consumer you have the right to ask for a refund. Firstly, contact customer service by using live chat, email, or calling them. Explain the situation and ask them to resolve it. If they don’t react to your complaints, you can also use social media to prevent other people from getting into the same situation. Many retailers avoid this scenario as it may damage their reputation. So they will help you with your problem quickly. Now that you know how to fight deceptive pricing and defend your consumer rights, let’s proceed to the examples. Deceptive Pricing Examples Many cases demonstrate brands misleading customers into believing that they’re buying products at a discount. The price may remain the same or even increase. This can happen due to a price increase before a discount or additional mandatory payments. So let’s consider several examples where deceptive pricing occurred. Hospitality industry This industry is often associated with drip pricing. Airlines may show discounted ticket prices but exclude baggage fees, seat selection fees, taxes, and other costs required to travel. Hotels show the prices on rooms without including local taxes or resort fees. May DF department store In 1989, the Colorado Attorney General's office accused a unit of the May Department Stores of practicing deceptive advertising in its home department. Since 1986 May had used exaggerated former prices as a basis for comparison against prices after a discount. Since deceptive pricing practices arise quite often, you need to be able to identify and unravel them. Consider the three steps above to protect your rights and fight deceptive pricing.

Cyber Monday is a shopping event that usually lasts for 24 hours and is created to encourage customers to shop online. It falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Customers can purchase the necessary products with great discounts, get special offers, and receive bonuses and gifts online. In this article, we’ll discuss the history of Cyber Monday and make the difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday clear. Next, we’ll review seven great ideas and examples of successful Cyber Monday campaigns. The History of Cyber Monday The term first appeared in 2005 and was used by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation. It highlighted that, for several years in a row, online purchases reached their peaks on the first Monday after the famous US holiday, Thanksgiving. The organization had two main theories that explain this phenomenon. According to the first theory, customers search for products in retail stores and malls on weekends to buy them online later. Since people didn’t have access to smartphones, tablets, and high-speed internet in those days, they had to wait for the beginning of their working week to use office computers toshop online. Another theory suggested that the phenomenon occurred due to the unpleasant experiences people had during the weekends after Thanksgiving when everybody wanted to grab a huge discount and the best deals. Cyber Monday was an alternative to the general chaos happening on Friday and the upcoming weekends. Itprovided an opportunity to avoid long queues to get some goods at a discount and purchase useful items via the internet while sipping a cup of coffee. Now that you know the history of this busy shopping day, let’s move to the next section to make the difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday clear. Cyber Monday vs. Black Friday Cyber Monday usually lasts 24 hours and falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. It offers huge discounts, great deals, andpromo codes to encourage people to buy online. Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days in the US and is conducted on the day after Thanksgiving. On this day, retailers provide customers with huge discounts, best deals, bonuses, gifts, and promo codes to encourage people to purchase both in stores and online. In a nutshell, the main difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday is in their dates and the fact that customers can find appropriate items online and in stores on Black Friday, whereas Cyber Monday welcomes online shopping only. Let’s grab some great ideas for your Cyber Monday campaign. 7Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas Run a campaign on social media Make use of email marketing Improve your website Invest in paid advertising Send SMS campaigns Ensure you have enough stock to meet the demand Team up with another company Companies come up with many unique ideas to surprise their customers and provide them with the best online shopping experience at the same time. We’ve prepared the best of them to satisfy customers and lure them into coming back soon. Run a campaign on social media Since the majority of people prefer to scroll feed on social media to find out about sales, best deals, discounts, gifts, and bonuses, there’s a point in running campaigns across the most popular platforms of communication. You can also leverage influencer marketing and ask opinion leaders for help. Let’s take Karen Millen, for example. The brand of women’s apparel promoted its sale in an Instagram postand mentioned a 70% discount to let followers use it and buy goods at low prices. Make use of email marketing 4.03 billionusers worldwide make email marketing the most popular and reliable channel. Brands have been using email campaigns to inform subscribers about great sales for years. Don’t miss your chance to leverage the most effective marketing channel to reach your customers and increase sales on this year’s Cyber Monday. For example, Steve Madden used an email newsletterto popularize the brand’sCyber Monday campaign and provide customers with more detailsabout its 40% discount and promo code. With LIKE.TG, you can send Cyber Monday email campaigns to your customer base for free. Make use of our ready-to-usefree email templates or design your own from scratch by using our drag-and-drop editor, and update customers on your Cyber Monday sale on time. Check out our article to learnhow to create email campaigns with our service. Improve your website When people come to your site to shop from different channels, you should be ready with several things: make sure that your website is responsive to let customers purchase from smartphones and tablets; test and optimize your website speed so that visitors can load your website in two seconds; check if your website is ready to handle high traffic to avoid any errors emerging on users’ screens. Invest in paid advertising Paid ads bring a lot of benefits to your business. They target specificaudience segments, broadcast your Cyber Monday sale through the most popular mediums, increase website traffic, and bring measurable results. Many brands successfully implement paid advertising and obtain significant changes in Cyber Monday campaigns’ performance. Send SMS campaigns Although SMSmight sound old school, they are effective. According to TechJury, SMS campaigns’open rateis 98%. Moreover, 60% of clients read these short text messages within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. That’s why you should think of sending SMS campaigns to your customers. LIKE.TGallows you to create and send SMS campaigns toyour customers within minutes. Add sender name,enter yourtext, add the list of recipients, and set up SMS send-out. Check out our article to learn how to create SMS messages step-by-step. Ensure you have enough stock to meet the demand If you want to increase customer satisfaction with your brand and provide a seamless experience, make sure you have enough inventory to meet the demand of many consumers. Bear in mind that there might be more shoppers than you expect. Get ready to meet the demand and make your clients happy. Team up with another company Consider partnering with another company to get extra exposure and reach more followers. If a brand is popular and has a lot of subscribers, it will help you promote your business and your Cyber Monday deals. For instance, Bliss, a famous brand that focuses on producing skincare products, offered its subscribers a 30% discount on its products if they buy online from another brand, Ulta Beauty. Let’s see how these Cyber Monday ideas work in real life. Examples of Successful Cyber Monday Campaigns We see hundreds of effective campaigns that drive organic traffic, boost sales and revenue, reach new consumers, and prosper every year. Now let’s take a look at some of these campaigns. Ulta Beauty The chain of beauty stores that provides its clients with skincare, fragrances, and cosmeticspopularized its upcoming sale on the most popular marketing channels, including Instagram. Customers can find a link in Ulta Beauty’s bio to shop its products online. Udemy The famous American online course company uses an effective way to distribute information about its Cyber Monday — with an email campaign. Since this online shopping day usually lasts only 24 hours, itmotivatescustomers to hurry up and grab an attractive offer. That’s why Udemy used a countdown timer to draw the attention of subscribers and evoke the fear of missing out. If you are interested in tools that help create a countdown timerfor your campaign, check out our article. To conclude, Cyber Monday is one of the busiest online shopping events and the most appropriate time to grow your business, increasing yoursales volume and revenues. Get ready for the next Cyber Monday with our best ideas!

Customer support automation is the process of replacing human customer support agents with technology. It implies no human intervention when managing customer inquiries. Rule-based chatbots, email automation, knowledge base, and ticketing system help reduce the workload on the company’s customer support team, increase customer satisfaction, provide instant answers 24/7, and generate more leads. In the video below, Alex explains how to automate customer support using chatbots. Check it out! In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of customer support automation and tasks that should be automated. We’ll also explain how to automate customer service. Why is it important to automate customer support? By automating customer support, you increase the productivity of your customer support agents. With instruments like chatbots and bulk email services, you can reduce human intervention in communication with clients and their workload. Artificial intelligence takes care of customer questions and troubleshooting issues. According to statistics, marketing automation enables companies to boost lead generation by 80%. ¾ of businesses succeeded in increasing conversions. As you can see, marketing automation instruments like email marketing solutions, chatbots, and CRM enable brands to reach multiple business goals. The same thing happens when you implement customer support automation. Prospects and clients have your support 24/7 and instant answers. Clients are happy with your company and service. With automation, you can provide a seamless customer experience without spending much money. You also save time and effort for your customer service team. They can prioritize more important tasks and ensure that all serious issues with the product are solved. The response time of your customer support team improves, and clients are satisfied with your brand. Useful tools such as chatbots unlock the ability of your team to provide instant answers through multiple channels. You can set up chatbots for messengers and social media platforms you use most often. Among them are WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram. If leads are satisfied with the instant answers of your customer support automation, they can convert into customers. So, this technology also serves you as a lead generation tool that improves the conversions and revenue of your company. Now that you know why it’s essential to incorporate customer support automation, it’s time to explore the benefits in more detail. They will help you decide whether your business needs innovative methods for your customer service. Benefits of Automating Customer Support Customer support automation can bring many advantages to your business. In this section, we’ll uncover them so you can know which areas of your customer support you can improve with this technology. Reduced workload on your customer support team. First, customer support automation helps your team avoid answering repetitive questions and reduce the workload. With this tool, customer service agents can focus on urgent tasks that chatbots can’t solve. Chatbots allow your company to deliver real-time support instantly, provide all the necessary information, and be online 24/7. You don’t need to waste your customer support agents’ time answering basic questions about pricing, features, and how-to guides. Customer support agents can focus on customer cases that require human intervention. When your company expands, you won’t need to hire new customer support agents to manage many basic inquiries. Chatbots can do this for you. Higher customer satisfaction. If you want happy customers and conversions, there’s no way to let users wait for hours for your customer support agent to answer. To increase customer satisfaction, you need to provide instant answers. Chatbots can do it for you 24/7 on weekdays and weekends. Since potential customers can have questions any time of the day, your company needs to be online. If you manage to do it with chatbots, you can boost satisfaction with your brand. Improved response time. When your customer support agents are not supported with technology, it can be difficult for them to manage all inquiries. When all the agents are busy with urgent tasks, there’s nobody left to answer the generic questions. It can make prospects wait for hours. To prevent such scenarios, you can incorporate chatbots. With their help, users will receive all the information they need quickly. As a result, the response time improves. Customer support agents continue working on complex customer cases while the AI chatbot answers FAQs. Omnichannel support. Automation can be applied to several channels. As a result, you can provide your customers with omnichannel support. You can automate communication on your website, messengers, and social media. The choice depends on the communication channels your target audience prefers the most. Your chatbot can handle direct messages on Instagram and messages on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram. This way, you help your customer support team and clients. Consumers can use the channels they are used to and receive information, whatever is convenient. As a result, prospects and clients have excellent customer experience with your brand. Fast feedback collection. Chatbots and email campaigns can be perfect tools for gathering customer reviews and feedback after interacting with your company or product. Your agents don’t need to spend time on calls to get the information. Just send them automated messages through chatbots or emails. Reduced costs on customer support. Customer support automation enables your company to reduce costs on salaries for customer support agents. With chatbots, you don’t need to hire new specialists to answer repetitive tasks. That’s how your costs can decrease. Moreover, chatbots help encourage more conversions. Proactive bots contact prospects at specific touchpoints of their buyer journeys and provide help. They don’t wait for leads to ask for assistance. This way, the possibility of conversion increases. Even more, AI chatbots can identify users who are more likely to make a purchase. It usually happens after the bot analyzes shopping behavior and questions. The bot can detect a high shopping intent and provide all the necessary materials like product catalogs, specific product information, and personalized assistance. Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to find out where to apply this technology. We’ll uncover some excellent ideas in the next section. What customer service tasks should be automated? In this section, we’ll provide some ideas of tasks that can be automated in your customer service. Let’s dive in. Routine inquiries. With chatbots and virtual assistants, you can easily manage FAQs without human intervention. Users receive instant and accurate answers to their queries, and customer support agents focus on more complex tasks. Bots can manage questions about product features, pricing, installment, etc. Appointment scheduling. Customer support automation enables you to make appointments on autopilot. Customers can contact you through WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger and make appointments and reservations through the chatbot. With the bot’s help, you can also schedule service calls online without the involvement of customer support agents. Order status updates. By incorporating automated systems, you can ensure that your customers will be updated on their order status, shipping notifications, and delivery estimates. Setting up triggers will deliver the notifications to customers once the order's status changes in the system. Password resets. Technology allows customers to reset their passwords without human help. Whether customers forget their password or just want to change it, they can do it freely through the chatbot or email. The bot will guide them through the password reset process. This way, clients don’t need to wait for customer support agents to join the chat. Payment processing. You can set up your chatbot to receive payments. This way, you can automate common transactions, billing inquiries, and payment reminders. When transactions are successful, customers will receive payment receipts. Knowledge base access. The chatbot enables you to connect your knowledge base so that users can search for the necessary information by themselves. The search feature will help them find all the materials to make positive customer decisions. Feedback collection. After interacting with users or after they perform purchases, send clients automated surveys or feedback forms. It will help you figure out whether customers are happy with your product or service. They can share their opinion about your customer support, product features, or delivery. As a result, you’ll be able to assess the quality of your service or product. Email responses. Email marketing platforms help you send automated emails after your company accepts payment, sends a product, or asks for feedback. This way, you acknowledge that the payment was received or the product was sent. Issue routing. You can use automated platforms to assign different inquiries to appropriate company departments on autopilot. The system will analyze the nature of the inquiry and route it to the agent responsible for this task. Returns and refunds. Chatbots can handle returns and refunds without your customer support agents’ involvement. It makes the process so much easier for your team and customers. Clients can initiate returns online without long calls and unanswered emails. Once their inquiry is approved, they will receive automated updates on the status of their request. Social media engagement. With social media monitoring tools, your team can automatically react to customers’ feedback, reviews, and comments on your posts. Send automated responses to users’ comments to acknowledge that you hear what they say and value their feedback. Handle complaints on Facebook and Instagram with bots to provide instant responses and show that you care. Analytics and reporting. Automatically gather information about customer service (call center metrics, customer satisfaction scores, and performance analytics). This way, you’ll be able to identify gaps and find areas for improvement of your services. Now that you know where to apply the technology, let’s learn how you can automate customer service. How to automate customer service? Automating customer service involves incorporating technology to manage repetitive tasks without human intervention. Here’s a short guide on how to improve your customer support and increase satisfaction. 1. Determine areas of need The first thing you should do is to focus on the areas of your business that need automation. Maybe your business is growing, and the number of customers has increased, so you have to automate communication with clients on WhatsApp. Some companies might need to automate their email campaigns because it’s the most preferred channel for communication with the target audience. Think of the areas where automation can bring real change. Analyze which channels your audience prefers the most. You might need automation for these messengers or social media platforms. Remember that omnichannel support is always needed. You can set up chatbots for multiple channels to make sure that clients feel comfortable contacting your customer support. Focus on customers’ preferences to provide the best experience with your customer service and company in general. You should select the right platform to bring all your ideas to life. 2. Choose the appropriate platform Once you figure out what kind of automation you need, it’s time to select the platform that covers all the features. When choosing software, pay attention to details like your budget and pricing, features, and automation you need. All these factors will influence your buying decision. If you want to automate several channels, select an omnichannel platform. This way, you’ll be able to avoid unnecessary spending. LIKE.TG is a multichannel software that empowers you to automate communication in messengers and social media. You can send automated email campaigns and manage inquiries in its built-inCRM. The service lets you set up chatbots for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. It makes it so much easier for you to handle repetitive questions and some basic inquiries. Below is an example of a chatbot that updates customers when an order is sent. With customer support automation, you can drastically increase the quality of your customer support, improve response time, and ensure support 24/7. As a result, higher satisfaction with your brand and more happy customers. Hope that our ideas will help you figure out how to incorporate automation into your business. Register with LIKE.TG to enjoy the benefits of automation for free. References: This article defines the term and unveils the pros and examples of customer support automation. In this article, you’ll find how automation helps your customer support team.

Database marketing – isa type of direct marketing, focused on personalization, based on using personal information about subscribers. A database is not the mailing listyou have. A database is an information stored about consumers and leads. It is the representation of relationship history between the company and a consumer. The main purpose of this information is to be relevantly used while doing business. This is a tool, with the help of which you can establish and develop your relationships with the clients. What should a database contain? Since it is a representation of relationship history, the database should contain essential details during all the history. There are to be answers to such questions as What? Who? Where? When? How often? How many? A client, having worked with your company for a while, expects you to remember him and your relationships. Traditionally, databases keep information about places where the products were bought, who bought them, prices and sales dates. Now, such information is just the initial step, which is to be carried out for effective relationship management with the consumers. Database Information Sales history Feedback Relationships between members of the database Marketing communications Clients’ calls to the technical support and the results Demographic characteristics Other additional data Marketers think that a good database allows you to determine a targeted segment more precisely than a traditional segmentation. Databases help companies to hold buyers’ attention to their offers, developing different methods of stimulation and encouragement basing on the analysis of consumers’ individual needs and preferences. A database allows you to develop a marketing strategy based on the differences among the consumers.

Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors. Why is brand differentiation important? Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit. Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue. In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy. Let’s find out how to create one for your business. 5Brand Differentiation Strategies Become an innovator Choose a winning pricing strategy Solve clients’ unique problems Appeal to emotions Deliver unique customer support In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors. Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted. Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does. Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product. Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem. Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid. Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.

Customer retention is the ability of a business to retain its customers. Retention is measured by the percentage of customers a company keeps over its total number of customers within a specific timeframe. In this article, we’ll unveil why customer retention is important, explore statistics and benefits, and compare customer retention and loyalty. We’ll also show you how to calculate customer retention rates and discover some excellent examples. Why is customer retention important? Customer retention relates to the number of new customers acquired and the existing customers who leave by not returning to purchase, canceling subscriptions, or closing contracts. That said, by calculating the customer retention rate, companies can determine how loyal their customers are and the effectiveness of their customer service. In turn, if there is a need, a business can devise ways to improve their customers' experience. Customer retention is essential to a brand for several reasons. Let’s highlight some of them. Saves marketing costs Acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than retaining a customer. As such, customer retention saves a company money and reduces its marketing expenditure by keeping existing customers interacting with its products and services. Additionally, since existing customers are already familiar with a brand's offerings, marketers spend significantly less time on customer support, further enhancing efficiency. Fosters repeat sales Existing customers are more likely to buy new products or services from a company. However, customers will only buy again if they believe the brand offers a better shopping experience than competitors. Benefits from word-of-mouth advertising Loyal and happy customers give a business the advantage of word-of-mouth promotion at no cost. Existing customers are more likely to tell their family members and friends about an enterprise, its products, and its services. And given that customers, especially those who are still prospects, respect the opinion of people who are close to them, they will be convinced to make purchases from a specific business. Have a look at these statistics: 46% of customers in America get brand information from family members, while 45% get info on potential purchases from friends. Moreover, 92% of customers trust the opinion of friends and family more than other marketing strategies. That said, the bottom line is that an existing customer is more likely to make referrals. New customers a business gains via word of mouth cost much less to acquire and have a significantly higher lifetime value compared to customers acquired in other ways. Allows to get useful feedback Existing customers give valuable feedback, which, if implemented, can enable a business to run more efficiently. By interacting with a business over time, existing customers are in a better place to give feedback about the areas that need to be improved. Repeat customers are easily approachable, and their suggestions for improvement can help at any time. Implementing customer feedback can help a business benefit from new opportunities that increase sales and retention rates. Earn profit on premium-priced products Existing customers are less conscious of the prices of products compared to new customers. Loyal customers already value a company and are ready to pay a premium fee to access the services or products the business offers. If you are still unsure about the importance of customer retention for your business, let’s discover some statistics that provide you with real proof presented in numbers. Customer Retention Statistics Customer retention is a valuable metric that directly affects your business, profitability, and success. Here are some important statistics that support this statement: customer acquisition is from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing clients; the increase in customer retention by 5% brings an increase in profit by 25%; the probability of selling to existing customers ranges from 60% to 70%, while for new clients, it is only 5% to 20%; 61% of small businesses report that over 50% of their revenue comes from repeat purchases rather than new clients; the order value of a repeat customer is 67% higher than a new client; loyal customers bring 50% more people than new clients; repeat customers are 50% more likely to buy new products; customer acquisition costs associated with traditional retail companies have increased by 54%; 17% of companies consider implementing loyalty programs to improve retention;clients spend between 31 and 36 months with a company. In addition to the advantages mentioned above, customer retention contributes to proper communication, sales, and growth. In the next section, we will explore all these aspects in detail. Benefits of Customer Retention Customer retention has pros for companies. It significantly drives profitability, growth, and overall business performance. Here are the main advantages. Drives better revenue. Retaining existing customers means more profit as buyers already have faith in a brand and are, therefore, more likely to spend more. Using customer loyalty programs to increase retention boosts returns significantly. Saves money. Implementing customer retention strategies costs less than attracting new buyers. It costs 5x more to land a new customer than to nurture an existing one. As such, focusing on retention can help cut down marketing costs since existing customers are already familiar with the business. Allows you to get valuable data. Existing customers are more likely to participate in surveys and, thus, provide a business with useful data. By acting on this data, a company can offer a more personalized experience to its customers and create effective targeted marketing campaigns. Build strong relationships with customers. Customer retention strategies, such as loyalty programs, make customers feel appreciated. In turn, they develop emotional connections with a brand and will be patient in case of mishaps. Marketers can increase customer appreciation by offering rewards or points during special occasions, for instance, customer birthdays. Boosts sales. By leveraging the data gathered through surveys, marketers can make better consumer suggestions, increasing the probability of purchases. It will result in higher sales in the near future. Measures your marketing strategy's efficiency. By analyzing customer retention metrics and reports, businesses can determine the effectiveness of their marketing strategies. Some of the vital retention metrics marketers need to pay attention to include repeat sales, loyalty program engagement, and purchase frequency. Provides effective communication. Repeat customers are more comfortable to communicate with, especially during emergencies such as recalls. Businesses can quickly match purchase dates and proceed to send messages to affected customers rather than sending a general email, which most likely will be ignored. Moreover, it is easier to relay sales, special events, and new product information to existing customers. It’s self-sufficient. Once a business sets up a customer retention strategy, little input is required from marketers as the programs are often self-sustaining. The only action a company has to take is to monitor various customer retention metrics. All the while, the retention strategies will be running on the initial settings. Helps gain new customers. Loyal, existing customers are a brand’s best advocates. They share their good experiences with a company, thus reassuring customers with doubts while also introducing the brand to new people. Encourages growth. Customer retention presents a chance for expansion. For example, if a brand needs a stock of consumer photos when launching a new product, existing customers can help with it. After all, clients are the best promoters because they are already familiar with what the business offers. Now when the advantages are clear, it’s time to calculate customer retention rate for your company and find out whether it’s good. Customer Retention Rate In this section, we’ll unveil customer retention and why it’s essential for every business to track it. Let’s start by defining the customer retention rate. What is a customer retention rate? Customer retention rate (CRR) is a metric that assesses the percentage of customers a company retains during a specific timeframe. It shows a business's ability to make existing clients stay with it and perform repeat purchases. Businesses strive to establish customer loyalty by providing enticing offers and creating loyalty and referral programs that lead to higher customer satisfaction. This way, they succeed in retaining their customer base and boosting profits. What is a good customer retention rate? Customer retention rates fluctuate and vary by industry. Yet, usually, a customer retention rate between 35% and 84% is considered a good one. Different aspects influence customer retention rates, including customer satisfaction, difficulty in leaving, customer success, and many other factors. However, it depends on your industry and is always unique. That’s why let’s discover customer retention rates for every industry you might be involved in. Average customer retention rate by industry When talking about the average customer retention rate, we can’t mention one specific universal number. As we’ve already mentioned, it depends on the industry and many other factors. The metrics rely heavily on the nature of your product or service, customer relationships, and the size of your business. Now, let’s see the average numbers for e-commerce, SaaS companies, banking, and many other businesses. According to Statista, we have the following numbers various industries get as their average customer retention rate. Multimedia businesses get an average of 84% because of long-term contracts and bundle promotions. IT companies usually have an 81% customer retention rate. Clients stay with the brand as long as it meets their expectations and requirements and solves their problems. Insurance companies have a quite high retention rate of 83% because clients stay with the same business for years due to multi-year contracts and attractive financial incentives. If you are involved in finance or banking, your average CRR should be around 75%—78%. The retention rate is quite high because customers have bank contracts that might last for years. Healthcare companies get 77% CRR, while construction and engineering businesses have an average of 80%. Now let’s jump into calculations associated with customer retention rate. They are necessary to estimate your CRR and identify whether it is good for your industry. How to calculate a customer retention rate? Customer retention rate (CRR) is given as a percentage. To calculate it, the following information is needed: The number of customers at the end of a specific business period (E) The number of customers acquired by the business over that duration (N) The number of customers at the beginning of that period (S) When calculating the customer retention rate, the number of new customers acquired is not counted, only the number of existing customers at the end of a specific period. To determine your remaining customers, subtract N from the value of E. To get a percentage, divide the result by the number of customers at the beginning, then multiply by 100. Below is the formula: CRR = ((E-N)/S) *100 Let’s imagine that you have a SaaS company with the following indicators to estimate your customer retention rate: The number of customers at the end of a specific business period (E): 155 The number of customers acquired by the business over that duration (N): 6 The number of customers at the beginning of that period (S): 130 CRR = ((136-6)/155*100 = 86% Your customer retention rate will be 86%, which is a good indicator for this industry. Now let’s find out the difference between customer loyalty and retention because these two concepts are usually misinterpreted. Customer Loyalty and Retention Customer loyalty and customer retention are related but don’t determine the same marketing concept. When you understand the major differences between these two terms, you can craft better marketing strategies and improve customers’ experience with your brand. So let’s dive in. Customer loyalty is the customer’s willingness to stay with the company and continue purchasing from it despite many choices and pricing. Clients remain loyal to a brand and engage with it. Customer loyalty can be measured using the following metrics: net promoter score, customer lifetime value, repeat purchases, and others. To encourage loyalty, companies often strive to establish a strong brand identity, provide a positive customer experience, create loyalty and referral programs, build communities, interact with customers, etc. Usually, customers stay with a brand because of the emotional bond they have with it. Customer retention is the ability of a brand to prevent customers from leaving over a specific timeframe. Companies use various marketing strategies and techniques to maintain their customer bases and prevent clients from switching to competitors. You can evaluate customer retention by using the customer retention rate formula provided above. When businesses focus on customer retention, they pay attention to customer satisfaction, seamless customer service, providing incentives, rewards, loyalty programs, and many other things to encourage interaction and repeat purchases. In short, customer loyalty focuses on building trusting and long-lasting relationships with customers, while customer retention is about retaining the same number of customers over a specific period. Both terms are essential for your business yet have different approaches and goals. Now that you clearly understand that your company needs to retain existing customers, we invite you to explore some excellent strategies that will help you achieve your business objectives. Top 10 Customer Retention Strategies Companies use many tactics to retain their customers, yet not all of them are effective. Below, we’ve listed the most successful strategies for you to consider. 1. Share case studies during the sales process Companies should provide information from previous case studies to reveal their style of collaborating and communicating with customers. They can then disclose the results achieved. With this information, new customers will set their expectations and be more welcoming of the experience they get while interacting with the company. Open Loyalty shares case studies on its website and narrates how businesses already use its product successfully. 2. Set expectations early Companies should communicate progress toward goals, deadlines, project inclusions, processes, and so forth to keep their customers informed. This will ensure that the customers are happy and, thus, ready for continued interaction with the business. 3. Develop a roadmap for the future Marketers should create and revise company-customer relationship roadmaps regularly to enable buyers to plan effectively. Doing this will keep the customers informed of the current and future stages of the relationship. 4. Create memories around shared successes Companies can boost customer retention by creating memorable events around their successes. Implementing this approach will also keep customers from dwelling on negative experiences, for example, missed deadlines, wrong deliveries, etc. 5. Create customer loyalty programs Loyalty programs motivate clients to choose your brand. Offer them to collect the bonuses after each purchase, and when they reach a particular amount of money, customers can use them to get a discount. For example, Innisfree provides customers with rewards for purchases. 6. Ask for feedback and act on it accordingly Ask your clients to estimate both the service and the products after every purchase. Let them not only provide you with points but allow them to leave a comment. This way, you can use it to improve the service. For instance, Sensatia Botanicals sends email campaigns asking customers for feedback after a specific time after purchase. One of them is shown below. 7. Provide attractive offers, discounts, and gifts Consider sending email campaigns, SMS, or chatbot messages informing customers about attractive offers of your company. If you want to encourage more purchases faster, you can establish a fear of missing out by adding countdown timers. With the help of discounts and promos, you’ll be able to prevent clients from leaving and make them repurchase with your brand. 8. Use proactive web push notifications, live chat, or chatbot When customers don’t interact with your brand, it’s essential to keep them. You can do it by incorporating proactive chatbots that will be triggered at a specific time. They will help you engage with your inactive customers and prevent them from leaving by providing something they are interested in. Chatbots can recommend products related to the latest purchases, provide items based on search history, or give discounts on products these clients were exploring. You can build a quality chatbot for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, or Telegram with LIKE.TG and effectively bring your customers back. 9. Incorporate AI to ensure excellent customer service Sometimes, customer support influences consumers a lot, especially when they can’t get the proper answers to questions that concern them. Providing seamless customer service is a must if you want your customers to stay loyal to your company and repurchase your products. For this purpose, consider using all the necessary tools, including AI, chatbots, and live chat, for instant and accurate responses. Although AI can help your business a lot, you still need some human agents to solve serious issues. It’s essential for high customer satisfaction and customer retention. Below, you can see a live chat from Etihad Airways, which supports customers 24/7. Clients can communicate using automated messages or connect with a human agent. 10. Bring social impact Consider collaborating with NGOs to bring change to our society or environment. You can start incentives where a part of the costs from your sales goes to fighting cancer, hunger, or environmental problems. This will help you establish a good reputation and make customers happy to be associated with you. It might encourage word-of-mouth promotion and more sales. Below, you can see how McDonald’s contributes to the community by helping families. If you are selling your product to businesses, there are some other strategies to consider. You can find them below. Top 8 B2B Customer Retention Strategies There are numerous customer retention strategies for businesses, yet they are different when we talk about B2B companies. Let’s discover the approaches that will help you make your business customers loyal. Provide value after a purchase. It's essential to follow up with your business clients after they complete purchases. Make sure to provide all the necessary materials related to your product. Incorporate proactive problem-solving. Predict potential issues and concerns that might arise and solve them before they become a bigger problem for your clients and your company's performance. To eliminate these issues, you need to look at feedback and customer data. Use automation. Consider using a CRM system to monitor customer preferences, interactions, and behavior. Then, set your communication with clients on autopilot using marketing automation. You can send follow-up emails, SMS, web push notifications, and chatbot messages to Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. The process is simple and fast when you use LIKE.TG. Assign dedicated managers. Consider assigning account managers to your high-value clients. This will help you understand the problems clearly and establish strong, trusting relationships with clients. Consider creating loyalty programs. With loyalty programs, you can show your business customers they are much appreciated and cared for. You can provide your repeat clients with discounts, credits, or exclusive offers to reward their loyalty. Ask for feedback. Surveys, interviews, and feedback forms are effective ways of gathering customer opinions about your product or service. By collecting this data, you can determine what businesses like and don’t like about your company. Here comes space for optimization and improvements, affecting customer retention and loyalty. Interact with clients regularly. Consider creating or participating in forums, user groups, or social media. They can become touchpoints with your clients. By building a sense of community, you can encourage decision-makers to repurchase your products or services shortly. Personalize your offers. After customers complete purchases, you have data that outlines customer behavior, purchasing history, and preferences. This information allows you to create highly targeted offers that perfectly suit clients' needs and requirements. Personalized offers enable you to showcase relevant products and encourage future purchases. However, incorporating all these techniques is very difficult without a special service. That's why, in the next section, we'll review the best options for you to consider. 5 Best Customer Retention Software Since customer retention is a complex process, requiring you to combine various techniques and approaches, it’s better to use a special service allowing you to automate it. These tools bring you various benefits, including improved customer insights, automated communication, personalized offers, seamless customer experience, instant customer support, and many others. By setting up routine tasks on autopilot, you can improve the efficiency and performance of your business, reduce the workload on your team, prevent human error, and incorporate proactive retention strategies. When choosing the perfect tools for your business, consider the features, usability, and pricing. Ensure that the platform integrates with all the apps you need, provides onboarding and training for inexperienced users, ensures customization features, offers in-built comprehensive analytics and reporting, has a friendly pricing structure, and excellent customer support. Now that you know where to focus, it’s time to provide you with the services with good pricing, all the necessary features, and usability. LIKE.TG LIKE.TG is a multipurpose solution allowing you to keep track of all your customers through its CRM, send personalized follow-up emails, tailored offers through chatbots, share important events and information through web push and SMS notifications, and many more. The platform is easy to use for beginners and it provides all the necessary onboarding and training for you to start fast. The pricing depends on the products you decide to choose. Its CRM will cost you $12 monthly. For this price, you can create 2 sales pipelines and 2 boards and use Automation 360. Below you can see how to work with LIKE.TG’s CRM. ClickUp ClickUp is a service combining CRM and project management. With its help, you’ll be able to ensure seamless workflows and interaction with customers and check analytics for long-lasting relationships with clients. The platform enables you to keep an eye on customer lifetime value, average order value, and churn rate, showcase your customer orders, sales pipeline, and other essential data on the Kanban board. The service has free and paid plans. The cheapest will cost you $10 monthly per user for unlimited dashboards, custom fields, time tracking, guests with permission, and many more. Below you can see how to manage tasks with ClickUp. Open Loyalty Open Loyalty is a service for developing loyalty programs contributing to a company's loyalty and retention. The programs are easy to personalize and customize, enabling you to tailor them to your customer’s preferences and purchasing history. With the service, you can create customizable loyalty programs and add discounts, giveaways, and gift cards. The platform’s analytics will help you track performance and ensure that your clients are satisfied with your offers. Contact Open Loyalty’s customer support directly for more information on its pricing. Below you can see how to create a loyalty program within the service. Hotjar Hotjar is a popular platform that marketers use to understand site visitors’ behavior. Its features help businesses gain comprehensive insights into how clients engage with the company’s website. With this data, brands can optimize user experience and encourage clients to complete their repeat purchases. It results in higher brand loyalty and customer retention rates. When using the service, your marketing team can send net promoter score surveys to customers to receive their feedback on the product. Marketers can identify selling opportunities using Hotjar’s data analysis. However, the platform requires special skills. The service offers a free plan covering unlimited heatmaps, recordings of user sessions, basic filters, and more. The paid plans start at $39 for tracking 100 daily sessions, using page views filters, accessing session information and technology filters, and monitoring custom user actions. Below you can see Hotjar’s dashboard. Zendesk Zendesk is a platform that keeps all your communication with customers in one place. With its help, you don’t need to worry about the security of your information, customer data, and the progress of your sales. Zendesk allows you to share all the necessary information with clients through knowledge bases. Your company will be able to provide instant help through chatbots and solve urgent problems immediately. The tool combines messaging and live chat, AI, and automation. The platform provides a free 14-day trial. After it expires, you’ll need to buy a paid plan which costs $69 monthly for one agent for the ticketing system, email, chat, voice, social messaging, AI agents, and more. Below you can see what the dashboard looks like in Zendesk. When using the software’s analytics and reporting, you should know what metrics to watch. They will help you identify whether your customer retention rate is good. In the next section, we’ll uncover the most essential customer retention metrics to consider for your business. Customer Retention Metrics Churn Rate Customer Lifetime Value Repeat Purchase Rate Net Promoter Score Customer Satisfaction Score Customer retention metrics are crucial for determining how effective your marketing strategy is and how many people switch to your competitors. After identifying the essential indicators, you can unveil areas for improvement and retain more clients with your company. So let’s start with the churn rate. Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of people who stopped purchasing and using your product or service at a specific time. When having a high churn rate, it’s crucial to determine the problems that lead to customers churning out. These can be issues with onboarding, customer service, high pricing, customer experience, customer retention strategies, etc. Churn Rate = (Customers Who Left / Customers at the Beginning of the Month)*100 Let’s imagine you have a subscription-based business. The total number of customers at the beginning of the month is 150 and the number of customers at the end of the same month is 4. Let’s calculate this indicator for this example. Churn Rate = (4 / 150)*100 = 2.6% It means that your customers are reduced in number by 2.6% every month. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total cost the customer spends during the relationship with your brand. Calculating CLV enables companies to identify high-value clients and allocate their budget correctly to attract these customers and make them repurchase products. Customer Lifetime Value = Value of a Purchase * Purchase Frequency * Customer Lifespan Let’s imagine you have a sports apparel company for professional runners. You established your business three years ago and have found that your customers typically purchase four pairs of sneakers each year. Let’s estimate the customer lifetime value of a client who has stayed loyal to your brand since the day of its opening. Average value of a purchase = $640; Purchase frequency rate = 4 times a year; Customer lifespan = 3 years. $640 ✖ 4 ✖ 3 = $7,680 $7,680 is the CLV of your most loyal customer. Repeat Purchase Rate Repeat Purchase Rate is the percentage of clients who buy several times from your company. It allows businesses to identify how loyal their customers are and the effectiveness of loyalty programs. Repeat Purchase Rate = (Number of Repeat Customers / Total Number of Customers)*100 Let’s imagine you have a home appliances company. Your repeat customers are 40, and your customer base consists of 102 clients. Let’s calculate the measure. Repeat Purchase Rate = (40 / 102)*100 = 39.22%. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Net promoter score is a metric that measures the likelihood of customers recommending a company’s product or services to their friends and family. It helps you evaluate customer loyalty and satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the highest score. NPS = (Promoters/Total Number of Respondents) - (Detractors/Total Number of Respondents)*100 For instance, if you send a survey to 100 respondents and receive 65 promoters, 12 passives, and 25 detractors, your NPS = (65 / 100)*100 - (25 / 100)*100 = 40%. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Customer satisfaction score is a metric that assesses customer satisfaction with a brand or customer experience. With its help, marketers can identify issues and optimize their businesses' performance. CSAT = (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Number of Survey Responses)*100. Suppose you’ve sent your survey about a specific experience with your company and received 130 responses. Let’s say 74 of them are happy clients. Time to calculate the measure. CSAT = (74 / 130)*100 = 56.92%. If your rates are low, consider some effective ways to boost customer retention. We’ll provide them in the next section. How to increase customer retention? By improving customer retention, you contribute to your business's success and customer relationships. We’ve listed the most effective techniques for improving customer connections and encouraging them to stay. Send re-engagement email campaigns. Businesses and their customers often grow apart after a while. Work, family, or changes in interests are just a few reasons for this trend. To keep customers involved, businesses should send re-engagement emails. Updates and offerings, as well as benefits, are some of the things a company can include in these emails. Segment and personalize. Generic marketing emails will not cut the mustard as far as customer retention goes. Customers prefer customized messages. With the help of an email marketing service. Email marketing services offer tools for mailing list segmentation based on gender, location, products purchased, etc. Give discounts. They encourage customers to keep coming back to a brand. By offering a discount for the next purchase, you make a small investment in fostering customer loyalty and boosting customer retention. Ensure seamless customer support. Consider using various tools to provide instant answers and solutions to customer problems. These can be a chatbot, live chat, or dedicated customer support agent. Customers’ concerns and issues should be resolved quickly, as this influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can use a virtual assistant to help customers choose the products they are looking for. Interact with your existing customers. After clients complete purchases, you still need to follow up with them, asking for feedback and gathering their concerns. They give space for improvement and optimization, allowing you to improve satisfaction with your product and company in general. Incorporate loyalty programs. By showing your appreciation to existing customers, you can gain their trust and loyalty and encourage repurchases. Various incentives, rewards, and discounts will entice clients to buy more products. Consider providing early bird access to special products, services, or events to stay loyal. Establish strong relationships with existing clients. Use various marketing tools to communicate with customers and share what they like. Email campaigns, chatbots, SMS, web push notifications, and many others to communicate your message and show transparency. LIKE.TG offers all these products, so you can use them after registration. Now let’s explore some tips for an even more effective customer retention strategy. Customer Retention Tips Since it’s often more cost-effective to retain existing customers and encourage them to purchase than acquire new ones, it’s a must to implement some helpful best practices. We’ve listed some of the most effective ways to retain your customers, so let’s explore. Encourage loyalty through shared values. If you have some company values, consider sharing them with your clients. Whether you donate to charities, help NGOs, or remain sustainable, let customers know about it. All these aspects influence customer decisions and make them stay with your brand, bringing change to society or the environment. Treat clients right. Although AI now replaces half of the human agents’ responsibilities, you shouldn’t forget that customers need support and sympathy when they face some issues. Consider using chatbots for basic frequently asked questions and add a button to connect with a human agent. This will help you provide more specific insights and personalized solutions to problems that appear. Make everything easy to understand. To outshine competitors, provide customers with excellent customer experience and seamless customer support. Everything clients use to access your product should be easy to understand and effortless. Ensure fast delivery options. Some customers prefer to receive products in days or weeks, but others need them immediately. To improve satisfaction, it’s essential to provide both options. Fast delivery will encourage your customers to return and get your products faster than from other brands. Incorporate gamification. Gamification elements can keep your customers engaged and interested in purchasing. By providing clients with rewards and points for buying products, you encourage them to make bigger purchases or return soon. Many consumers will be eager to shop now and receive a good discount during their next shopping trip. Allow the “Buy now, pay later” option. Not all customers can instantly buy a product, especially if it’s costly. In such cases, it’s crucial to have a “Buy now, pay later” option available. More clients can shop with you and get the products they need right now. Ensure easy refunds. Different situations can happen: customers can get the wrong product, it may not work well, or it may not comply with the customer's requirements. You should always ensure easy returns and refunds. It’s a must when you want customers to come back. Now that you know how to boost customer retention, it’s time to see how it works in real life. Below you’ll find some excellent examples for some inspiration. 5 Customer Retention Examples From Famous Brands In this section, we’ll review 5 excellent examples for your inspiration. They incorporate various strategies to retain customers and make them loyal to their companies. Starbucks — Loyalty Program Starbucks retains its customers with a loyalty program. The company encourages clients to install a special app and sign up for it. After every purchase, these customers will get stars. Later, they can exchange stars for rewards like free food and drinks. The redemption starts at 25 stars. Amazon — Prime Membership Amazon offers customers the opportunity to join its membership to enjoy the benefits of the service. Amazon Prime members can take advantage of one-day delivery, a 10% discount on various products, and the ability to shop throughout the week and receive all the items in one day. Spotify — Personalization The popular music service uses personalization and predictive analytics to retain its subscribers. The platform cares about its customers and strives to retain them by providing music they like. Subscribers can explore tailored playlists to their preferences, such as “Weekly Discover,” “Spotify Wrapped,” or “On Repeat.” Nike — Multichannel Customer Service Nike cares about its customers through excellent customer support. When having product problems or looking for consultations and recommendations, clients can always contact customer service and get quality help. If customers have any questions and want to receive instant answers, they can install the company’s app. It enables them to navigate the nearest stores, get gear recommendations, or join the community. Ikea — Educational Content Ikea’s YouTube channel is full of educational content that allows customers to design their own homes comfortably. Various videos on different topics help Ikea’s customers find solutions to their problems. Congrats! Now you know what customer retention is and why it’s essential. We hope that our strategies, tips, and examples will help you develop an excellent customer retention strategy.

Customer satisfaction is a metric that indicateshow happy a customer is with a company, product, or service. It helps a brand determine what a client thinks and how they feel after interacting with this particular company. In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of customer satisfaction and review its benefits. We’ll also unpack some tips to improve and assess this metric. Why is customer satisfaction important? The process of acquiring new customers is time-consuming and expensive. Businesses track the degree to which consumers are satisfied with their brands and products to identify their unhappy customers and try to retain them byproviding themwith special offers. Since regular clients spend 67% more money than people who purchase from a brand for the first time, marketers develop tactics and strategies to persuade loyal customers to stay with their companies. They also strive to provide excellent customer service to get repeat sales and new clients. Businesses check whether customers are satisfied with their products because loyal clients are word-of-mouthbrand promoters. Loyal customers have a shorter sales cycle since they don’t spend time comparing, researching, and doubting. As a result, businesses obtain higher revenues. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend a brand on social media or to their family and friends. Moreover, satisfied consumers aren’t likely to switch a brand and buy from its competitor. Let’s now talk about the advantages of customer satisfaction in more detail. Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Knowing the level of customer satisfaction helps you gather and direct all your efforts to the right place to ensure a better customer experience. Let’s now take a look at some essential benefits of this metric: competitive advantage; positive word-of-mouth promotion; shares, comments, and referrals; reduced customer churn; audience growth; customer loyalty; brand recognition; good ROI; high level of trust; increased brandpopularity; high customer retention rate; best customer experience; positive feedback; reduced price sensitivity; strong relationships with customers; great possibility to achieve success during new product launches; stable income. Now that you know the benefits, let’s proceed to the next section to discuss several techniques to improve your customers’ satisfaction with your brand. 5Tips to Improve Customer Satisfaction Ask for feedback Provide support on different channels Track mentions on social media Simplify your service Delight your customers Many businesses search for ways to provide the best customer service and obtain higher customer satisfaction as a result. However, you shouldn’t stop here as there are still many areas that require improvement. Since all companies have different target audiences with their unique needs and expectations, there’s no one-stop solution. However, there are still many ways to make your clients feel satisfied with your brand. Ask for feedback To understand what goes wrong and improve customer experience, ask your consumers for reviews or feedback. If you want your business to operate smoothly, you should be aware of customers’ needs and wants. Listen to them, their wishes, advice, and complaints. You can obtain this information from surveys. You’llgain some insights intoyour customers’ satisfaction with your brand and the improvements your business requires. As an option, let your clients leave their reviews under product cards or send them special forms after a purchase. For example, Booking.com lets customers leave their comments under product cards. Provide support on different channels Companies that provide 24/7 support are easier to contact, so theircustomers’ satisfaction is higher. They can instantly provide answers to clients’ questions and solve problems that arise. Customers usually use different channels and devices to contact support. Therefore, make sure to cover the most popular communication channels: phone, email,live chat, and social media. As a result, you’ll see noticeable changes in your company’s credibility and customer satisfaction. For example, ClickUp, a project management platform, offers customers to see video demos and support docs or start a live chat to provide answers to customers’ questions. LIKE.TG helps create chatbotsfor WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger to support customers 24/7. Track mentions on social media Customersoften prefer just to skip surveys, so only people who are satisfied with a brand will fill in questionnaires and leave some positive comments about a product. However,you can’t find out the drawbacks of your company’s products or services that way. To do this, you need to receive negative feedback as well. Monitoryour brand’s mentions and tags on your customers’ social media profiles. Digital platforms allow consumers to leave both positive and negative reviews. For example, clients can discuss the problems of low-quality products, poor customer support, hidden costs, etc. You need to do your best to analyze customer feedback and solve possible issues. You can see a customer mentioning Rare Beauty and writing about her feelings when interacting with a brand and using its products in the post below. Simplify your service If you want to provide customers with an excellent user experience, you need to makeyour service simple and intuitive. Companies often think about productfeatures and forget about usability. The easiest-to-use products attract visitors since they don’t have to spend time learning how to use a certain platform. Amazon does its best to make things as easy as possible and enable users to make one-click purchases. Delight your customers Ensure excellent customer support. Be timely, solve problems quickly, and help customers succeed. For example, many companies implement customer loyalty programs to encourage clients to purchase. Prepare some rewards for your regular clients to surprise them with gifts during their birthdays or thank them for staying with your brand. Take a look atSephora Beauty Insider’s reward program and the benefits it offers to customers. It’s time to find out how to measure customer satisfaction. How to Measure Customer Satisfaction The best way to collect data from your customers is by conducting surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys are necessary if you want to measure this metric. With surveys, companiescan find answers to their specific questions. The best time to send them is right after the situations you want to ask about. Send out your survey as soon as possible to obtain the true reflection of a customer’s experience with your company. For example, ask a customer to rate your customer support after they contact it or conduct a survey after they purchase something to find out about their overall experience. Many free online survey tools can help you during this process. Leveraging such platforms allows you to design surveys based on your needs. Use Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Zoho Survey to create in-depth surveys and obtain the data you need. This information will enable you to improveyour brand and retain more customers. Congrats, now you know the importance and benefits of customer satisfaction. With our tips, you can improvethis metricand retain loyal clients. Remember to track the degree to which customers are happy with your company to stay updated.

The customer satisfaction index (CSI) is a metric that reflects the overall customer satisfaction with a company in terms of product quality,customerservice, price, etc. It allows brand owners todetermine the reasons for consumers’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In this article, we’ll explain why CSI is important, howit differs from CSAT, and how to calculate it. Why is the customer satisfaction index important? Measuring customer satisfaction is a top priority for every business because clients’ feedback is a valuable contribution to the development of a company. This metric allows marketers to gain insights into various business aspects and have a clear picture ofa company’s health. Calculating the customer satisfaction index enables business owners to: reveal business areas that have a greater impact on customer satisfaction; identify the level of customer satisfaction from different perspectives (customer service, product quality, price, website usability, etc.); blow up sales; increase customer retention and loyalty; decrease customer churn; allocate budget wisely; optimize and improve products. Now that you know the importance of CSI, it’s time to learn how to measure it. How to Calculate Your Customer Satisfaction Index CSI is closely related to the customer satisfaction score (CSAT). The only difference is that CSI allows you tocalculateyour overall satisfaction score based on different attributes. For example, your overall customer satisfaction rating is 70%, where the product’s qualitycomprises 50%, and theremaining 20%are your unknown attributes. Hence, you should understand which business area contributes significantly to your company’s growth. To calculate your customer satisfaction index, use the formula below. CSI = (attribute 1+attribute 2+attribute 3) / 3 Note: an attribute is any area you are interested in. Say, your customer satisfaction scores are as follows: Website usability — 60 Product quality — 70 Customer care — 50 Price — 55 Then, your CSI is 58.75 (60+70+50+55) / 4 = 58.75 This is the overall satisfaction score of your companythat you can use during presentations and internal meetings. Alternatively, you can use special analytics tools to measure your CSI. Congrats, now you know what the customer satisfaction index is and how to calculate and use it.

Customer self-service is a process of receiving help from a brand without involving a customer care support agent. Users can find answers to their questions by investigating the brand's knowledge base, FAQ, help center, customer portal, chatbot, online chat, community forum, etc. LIKE.TG lets you support your customer 24/7 without the help of a live chat agent using our chatbotsand live chat for your website. In this article, you'll get to know the benefits of customer self-service, learn how to implement it, and get inspired by the example. Stay tuned! Why should you provide customer self-service? Providing customer self-service today is rather a necessity than an option. Remember the last time you wanted to find out the size chart of a product, the exchange policy, or how to get started with a new service. You were probably trying to solve your issue on your own using the website resources instead of contacting the company. This is common in today's reality. People avoid calling customer service centers as it is stressful for many. Therefore, you, as the business owner, have to adapt and offer them alternatives, or you will miss the sale. According to the research, 67% of online users would rather find answers independently than contact a company’s representative. For 75% of respondents, customer self-service is a convenient way of dealing with their issues. 91% of users prefer a knowledge base if it meets their needs. HubSpot states, that providing users with an immediate response is essential, which is almost impossible if every user contacts the calls the help center. Providing users with a customer self-service allows brands to yield lots of benefits. So, read the next section to evaluate your opportunities. Benefits of Customer Self-Service Providing self-service is beneficial for both customers and your customer support agents. With a thought-out strategy, you’ll manage to yield the following benefits. It improves your customer satisfaction. As we’ve mentioned in the research above, most online users would prefer to find the answers on their own if the company provides the necessary resources instead of calling the support agent. For some of them, talking to a company representative may be stressful, while others need time to explore the service at their pace. To stay competitive and increase the number of happy customers, you should adapt and provide support in alternative ways. It allows you to provide users with immediate responses. According to Forrester, response time is a top priority for 73% of online users. They expect companies to answer immediately, which is barely possible if a company provides phone support. Checking the help center or knowledge base or looking for answers via a chatbot is a great chance to solve the issue quickly and 24/7. It lets your customer support agents deal with more complex tasks. Customer care representatives often complain about the same requests. Since they receive similar general questions daily, they have less time to deal with more complicated issues and cases. As a result, many customers don’t receive the necessary support. Providing customer self-service lets you automate answering routine questions via a chatbot, FAQ, help center, or knowledge base. This way, you’ll prioritize your tasks to pay more attention to difficult problems. It helps you save money on support. As your company grows, your customer support team will receive more and more requests. Hence, you’ll need to hire more representatives and spend time and resources educating them, resulting in high expenses. You can save some money by providing customer self-service and assisting clients via a chatbot. You need to write the instructions and set up a chatbot once and it will work to your advantage. It enables you to close more deals. When prospects and clients find no answer to their questions on your website, they are very likely to abandon their shopping cart and go to your competitors providing these answers. At this point, you lose sales. So, provide users with all the necessary instructions and close more deals. Now that you know the advantages of providing customer self-service, it’s time to learn how to do it. Read the next section. How to implement customer self-service? In this section, we’ll share the instruction to create a really helpful customer self-service. You don’t need to spend much money or hire specialists to make it work. Follow the tips. Keep track of users’ requests. Your content-creating team should collaborate with customer support to uncover the most popular user questions. Often, these are the most general questions regarding your product or service which you can answer in the article without much sweat. Create a list of requests which don’t require the attention of a support representative. You can provide the answers to them on your help center, knowledge base, or via a chatbot or a live chat on your website. LIKE.TG lets you create up to 3 bots for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram for free if you have up to 1,000 contacts. Or, you can add a live chat to your websiteto convert more site visitors into clients and collect user data. Analyze your brand queries. Monitor the search queries which bring leads to your website via such services as Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, etc. You’ll get to know which brand queries make up the most of your website traffic. If there’s no answer on the corresponding page, consider writing an article or providing another type of instructions to share with your customers. Create a list of FAQs. Consult your customer care department, check out the profiles of your brand on social media, and look through online forums to discover users’ frequently asked questions about your brand. These types of questions imply a short answer which you can even provide on your landing page or place in the website menu for easy access. Also, you can add this section to your live chat on a website, chatbot in Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp to reach more people. Update your guides and instructions regularly. Providing customer self-service is not a one-time activity. Firstly, your articles can miss some little but important for your users details. Secondly, redesigning your website interface requires you to update all the instructions throughout your site and social media, since the current guides, screenshots, and videos are no longer relevant. Refresh all your resources after each interface redesign and after receiving more FAQs by phone support. Use different types of content formats. Enrich your content with images, videos, screenshots, audio, etc. These formats will be the most useful for your prospect since they illustrate the process of using your service. A step-by-step guide with screenshots won’t leave a user dissatisfied. Remember to update it regularly! Ensure your customer self-service is mobile-friendly. You can create an advanced chatbot and knowledge base with many categories and tags to find the necessary information easily but if these resources aren’t optimized for mobile users, you’ll fail. More and more users go mobile, so if they don’t manage to find the necessary answer using their smartphone, they’ll switch to another brand. To ensure a positive customer experience, check if it’s convenient to use your resources from mobile devices. Make sure your customer self-service is easy-to-find and use. Your educational resources with tons of useful instructions, answers to FAQs, and screenshots may turn out to be meaningless if users can’t access them easily. Ensure that your customer self-service is easy to find and leads don’t have to navigate your site for hours to look for the answers. You can add it to your site menu and provide the corresponding CTA on the homepage. It’s also important to let users search via a convenient search bar where they can type their query in different ways. Categorize your topics by tags and keywords to provide customers with seamless and flawless experiences. Now that you know how a helpful customer self-service should work, look at the examples below. Examples of Customer Self-Service Well-known companies have long appreciated the benefits of customer self-service. In this section, we’ll show you how they do their best to increase the number of satisfied clients without hiring many customer care agents. Tilda is a famous website, landing page, and online store builder. It allows non-tech-savvy marketers and enthusiasts to create a professional website using a pre-designed template. Such a service definitely receive hundred of users’ questions every day. So, Tilda provides a great many helpful resources to reduce the workload of their support representatives. On their homepage, right at the top you can find the “Support” section with several options available. Wragby Parker is an American retailer of glasses. The company lets its clients use a chatbot to receive the answer to their questions. They can use a search bar and type in their query. The chatbot allows not only to read the information on using the service but track the status of the order, which is very convenient for those who don’t like to contact a customer care agent. Congrats, now you know the benefits of providing a customer self-service and the ways to implement it. Create a chatbot for free with the LIKE.TG intuitive builder to answer clients’ FAQs, keep them informed, and accept payments!

Customer success is a methodology that entails predicting customers' problems and questions that might occur and providing solutions to them. This approach aims to lead consumers toward the success and achievement of their end goals. It helps companies drive customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. In this article, we'll get to know why customer success is important, how it works, and how to build a customer success program. We'll also review customer success roles and responsibilities, compare customer success and customer service, and explore the key metrics. Why is customer success important? Today, the majority of successful brands pay great attention to customer success. They strive to understand their customers' needs and desires and anticipate future problems and questions. Companies help consumers attain their goals, resulting in a positive reputation, customer loyalty, high customer retention, and profitability. Statisticssay that72% of companies report customer successto be one of theirmajorpriorities and keys to progress,which is why they focus on its improvement. Assisting clients and taking part in their success means a lot to your customers. As a result, you'll drive customer happiness and satisfaction and reduce churn. If people are satisfied with your company, they will sincerely recommend it to other people.Superb experience and achieving customer goals are excellent reasons to recommenda company and refer friends. Remember,buyers can help you increase your customer base when they are happy and satisfied, making your revenue grow. That's why you should manage your clients' inquiries, analyze customer portfolios to improve their experience, and help achievebuyers'goals. Now that you know whycustomer success is crucial, it's time to find out how it works to manage the process properly. How does customer success work? If you want todelivercustomer success effectively, you need tohave a tool, team, and strategy. Select a tool or software. Choosea solution that suits your team's needs best to attain healthy relationships and establish seamless communication with customers. Search for your perfect software to communicate with clients when they need help and lead them to success. As a result, you'll get happy customers who stay loyal. Assemble a team of professionals. To lead customers toward success and assist them during every step of the process, you'll need a team. Look forfriendly and supportiveprofessionalswhoactually like your company and understand the products or services you offer.They should be able toreact fast and provide solutions. Once you have a team, conduct training to ensure that your success reps know all the peculiarities of your products or services. Whenyour company starts to grow, you can increaseyour customer success team size. Develop a strategy. You can use customer success strategiesbased on the solution you offer and customers' needs. However, you still need to gather a team, select your tools, and define customers' goals andyour company's expectations. Make sure that every team member is aware of each step of your customer success strategy. It's time to jump into the next section to explore the duties excellent customer success reps should perform. Customer Success Roles and Responsibilities Answering emails and managing tickets aren't the only responsibilities of customer success managers. Since customers' needs and goals are a priority for any company, a team of professionals who will manage theseresponsibilitieseffectively is anecessity. Customer success representatives are responsible for making a company and a customer gain value. Let's review more customer success reps' responsibilities: onboard new customers; call clients and assist them whenever they need help; provide training to clients so that they can get the most out ofa product or service; build healthy, strong relationships with customers; checkif a productmeets customers' needs; implement innovations to bring customers to success and ensure value; establish trust, transparency, and credibility; pay attention to customer feedback to eliminate problems andenhancecustomer experience; act as a mediator between a customer and a company; offer clients to upgrade theirsubscription plans; track clients whosesubscription plans are about toexpireand offer to renew them. Now that you understand customer success team responsibilities better, it's time to proceed to the difference between customer success andcustomer service. These two terms are often used interchangeably, yet they have distinctfeatures thathelp reach different targets. Customer Success vs. Customer Service People often confuse customer success and customer service— what are they, and how do they differ? Let's take a look at each term in more detail to figure it out. Customer success is a proactive process. It means that reps prevent customers from facing any problems that might arise. Customer success teams bring value to clients and strive to help them reach theirprimary goals. To do it, team members collectcustomer data and develop specific strategies, aimingto lead customers toward success.These teams focus on delivering value, increasing satisfaction, achieving goals, and providing a seamless experience. Customer service is a reactive process. It indicates that customer support takes action only whena problem arises. Once issues appear, customer support reps search for solutions to help their customers. However, they don't prevent these problems. Customer service entails solving issues and assisting with processes that might be confusing for clients. In a nutshell, customer success is about preventing customers from having any issues with a product in the future and reaching success, whereas customer service is about solving a problem once it arises at a specific moment. The difference is clear now, so let's have a look at the process of creating a customer success program. It'll help youbuild your strategy more efficiently. Howdo you build a customer success program? Thereare numerous reasonsbehind customer success programs— a low number of customers who churn out, the opportunity to upsell, higher profitability, and more loyal clients are just a few of them. If you are interested in making your business more profitable and efficient, consider the following steps to create your plan. Define customers' goals. Understandingbuyers' ultimate goals is the key to your team's success. Thus, you should learn what success means to your customers to create an effective program. Ensure you have a well-developed sales workflow tohelpidentifyclients' goals and align them with your product. Onceyou meet your leads'expectations, they become customers. Afterward,your customer success teamstarts assisting your new consumers. Identify the key metrics. Besides customers' goals, pay attention to the essential metrics. With their help, you'll be able to know the health of each account. The metrics you choose to assess each account depend on the product you provide to these users. Train your customer success team. Remember, a strong team of professionals can do wondersfor your business. Since interactions betweenyourreps and customers play an essential role in your brandgrowth, choose your employees carefully. Friendly andempathetic customer success managers can bring in new clients, but cold andgrumpy ones can scare customers away. Ensure consistency in product and customer success teams. Product and customersuccess teams should work hand in hand to develop a product people will appreciate and benefit fromand ensure consistency when communicating with customers. Sincethese teams often have different intentions and ideas, it can cause several problems. That's why you should be ready to prevent such issues and ensure seamless communication between product and customer success teams. Shareyour company's goals with them and use tools that suit both departments. Search for the right tool. Customer success is a popular methodology among different businesses, so you can find multiple solutionsto keep an eye on your key metrics. There are many customer success tools thatcan meet your key needs, including ChurnZero, Planhat, Whatfix, and many more. Gather customer feedback. This step is mandatory since you'll be able to get a clear picture of customer satisfaction with your product and company in general. The net promoter score will help you assess whether your customers will recommend your brand to other people. This way, you'll have insights into your future steps. Now that you know how to build a customer success program, let's walk you through the key metrics. These indicators will allow you to evaluate your customer success managers'performance. 5 Key Customer Success Metrics To find out whether your customer success strategy is effective, you need tokeep tabs ontheprimary metrics that help measure it. Customer health score. Thismetric helps determine whether customers are healthy or likely to churn. Todiscover whether a customer is healthy, you need to evaluate how often they use your product, how many users from one accountuse it, andwhat features they prefer to implement. A customer who logs in often has a healthy account. Still, if only a few users implement your product, it means that this account is at risk. Thisis a sign thatyour customer doesn't receive enough value to achieve their key goals. Customer churn rate. This metric helps instantly point outcompany representatives who establish strong and trusting relationships with clients and those who don't. A goodcustomer success rep will have a lower churn rate. Building healthy relationshipsenables you to make more people stay loyal toyour brand. Net promoter score (NPS). Ask your customers if they would recommend your company to their friends to evaluate your NPS. However, before doing it, make sure that your companyprovides the best customer experience. Check whether your clients are satisfied with your product and feel content about your customer support. Remember, relationships and communication with your brand's reps will influence their responses. If customers are happy with your company, they will tell their friends about your products or services. Customer lifetime value (CLV). This indicator helps you estimate the revenue you can earn from one customer. Brands use it to determine the value of each client.If this value increases, it means that your business grows and brings you higher profits. Check out the formula to calculate CLV for your business. Monthly recurring revenue. It allows you to find out how much money customers spend on your products each month. You can compare your revenue each month and determine whether it increases. This will give you an understanding ofhow useful your product is. If the value increases, it means that it helps customers succeed, and they continue purchasing it. You know a lot about customer success now, so it's time to scale your business using it. Track these metrics to figure out whether your product helps customers thrive and succeed.

ABC analysis is a method that entails categorizing items based on their perceived value and is used in inventory management. It helps companies identify the most valuable products that match their customers’ demand, control and allocate resources efficiently, reduce obsolete inventory, and increase sales. Watch the video below to uncover how ABC analysis works. We will discuss an inventory categorization method based on the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. According to this principle, 20% of a company’s main goods represent 80% of itssales volume. In this article, we’ll review the use of ABC analysis, explore its advantages and disadvantages, and check out the six steps to conduct the analysis. What is the use of ABC analysis? ABC analysis enables businesses to figure out how to manage their inventory based on the key metrics. A brand needs to understand customer demand to determine whether its clients will buy a certain product. Companies that opt for ABC analysis have a chance to analyze their demand and manage their inventory based on this data. One more reason businesses use ABC analysis is stock optimization. To meet customer needs, obtain a significant sales volume, and a higher profit, a company should categorize its products based on demand, importance, and profit. With the received information in mind, business owners can set prices for their products or services strategically. ABC analysis helps identify and reduce the number of products customers don’t like or those with a low-profit margin. After the method is implemented, entrepreneurs obtain a smoother supply chain, reduce costs on additional stock, and allocate resources efficiently. Now that you know the use of ABC analysis, we’ll proceed to the pros and cons of this technique. Advantages and Disadvantages of ABC Analysis By evaluating inventory and classifying it under the principles of ABC analysis, companies can identify the areas of manufacturing or sales that bring in the most value. The main advantage of this technique is that it enables you to determine the goods that consumers buy most often and monitor their availability to avoid stockout. Hence, businesses can focus on high-priority products that bring good ROI. One more advantage of this method is the efficient allocation of resources. With ABC analysis, you can spend more money on purchasing goods popular among customers and ultimately bring good profit to your company. Moreover, it enables you to reduce costs on items that bring little or no profit and just gather dust on the shelves of your warehouse. The disadvantages of the method include conflicts with traditional costing systems and substantial expenditures. Routine analysis of high-priority products requires higher expenses, which is why a company should prepare some extra costs. The pros and cons are clear now, so let’s figure out how to organize the process. 6Steps to Conduct ABC Analysis To do an effective ABC analysis, you need to follow a particular sequence of actions. We’ve prepared six steps for you to consider when implementing this method into your business strategy. Stick to these steps to conduct a successful analysis. Define the things you want to analyze. The main goal of ABC analysis is to determine the importance of each product. The method enables you to identify the most and least profitable items. As a result, you’ll be able to improve the financial performance of your company. Think of the items you need to analyze to understand their value for consumers and the profit they bring. Gather the necessary information. Once you define the inventory to analyze, collect information about ordering and carrying costs. Leverage one of your accounting tools to obtain this data. Sort your goods. Before diving into the process, sort your products based on their cost. Rank them from the most expensive to the cheapest ones. Figure out the impact of your products on the company. List down the products in a spreadsheet and find out the influence each of them has on your business. Divide the goods and their annual costs. Divide your products into three classes based on demand. Now it’s time to split up your goods into categories based on the main principle of ABC analysis. Divide your products into three groups: A — the most valuable products that bring 80% of your profit, category B — less popular and valuable products that bring 15%, and C — items that bring 5% of revenue. Analyze the obtained data. In the end, you’ll have a spreadsheet with items that generate the most revenue and those that aren’t popular with your buyers. Check out the list to find the money makers at the top. Once you obtain the necessary information about high priority and low priority products, use it to your advantage. Remember that you still need to track your goods’ pricing and selling performance to ensure that their positions don’t fluctuate. In a nutshell, the technique is especially useful in terms of warehouse management. It helps identify the items that bring the highest profit and products that a business owner doesn’t need to replenish. The analysis gives business owners a clear picture of the sales performance of certain goods.

Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors. Why is brand differentiation important? Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit. Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue. In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy. Let’s find out how to create one for your business. 5Brand Differentiation Strategies Become an innovator Choose a winning pricing strategy Solve clients’ unique problems Appeal to emotions Deliver unique customer support In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors. Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted. Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does. Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product. Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem. Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid. Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.

A customer satisfaction survey is a marketing instrument used by businesses todetermine clients’ level of satisfaction with a brand. This questionnaire helps companies identify dissatisfied consumers, better understand their needs, optimize products, and improve customer service. In this article, we’ll explain why customer satisfaction surveys are so important, shed light on their types, offer some tips on how to create them, and provide several examples. Why is a customer satisfaction survey important? It’s impossible to evaluate a product without customer feedback objectively.First, you need to determine who your product is designed forsincethose you identify as your target audience will be your company’s source of the most valuable insights. You can’t launch a new product successfully if you don’t know for sure if your customers actually need it. Similarly, you can’t optimize and improve your current product if you haven’t identified your clients’ pain points. You also can’t simply fire your customer service rep who received a few complaints and hire new staff without analyzing what they did wrong. To reveal your weak points and understand how to optimize your product, you should implement several types of satisfaction surveys. Types of Satisfaction Surveys A satisfaction survey is a general namefor all surveys that help obtain valuable information about your brand and analyze clients’ feedback. Try to use different types of surveys depending on what insights you want to get. Check them out below. Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is the most popular satisfaction survey both for customers and employees. Its goal is to find out whether customers would recommend your product or service to their friends and colleagues. Detractors (score 0-6) are dissatisfied clients who may even harm your brand reputation. Passives (score 7-8) are clients who are satisfied with your productbut are not ready to promote it. Promoters (score 9-10) are your most loyal clients who recommend your product to their friends. Post-Purchase Survey. Businesses offer clients to answer several questions after they make a purchase. Thegoal here is to discover whether customers are satisfied with yourproduct quality, checkout, and customer service. You can send a post-purchase survey via email with LIKE.TGfor free. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey. With the help of this survey, businesses measure whether clients are satisfied with their products in general. Respondents have five options: very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, or very satisfied. This type of survey allows companies to understand how well they meet their clients’ expectations. Product or Service Development Survey. This survey is extremely helpful for businesses as it allows them to predict the success of a new product. Marketers send this survey before a product is launched to determine whether their clients actually need it. This survey aims to discover users’ needs and learn more about product improvements that can be made. Usability Survey. As the name suggests, this type of survey allows product owners to gain some insights into the user experience. They are usually shown as pop-ups on websites and in apps. This survey helps users better navigate a company’ssite, find the necessary content, andget the best user experience. Now that you know several types of satisfaction surveys, it’s time to learn how to create one, so follow our tips below. How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey Use different types of questions Keep your questions short Only ask the most important questions Try to make consistent scales and stick to one survey type Stick tostylistically neutral words Indicatehow much time the survey will take Inform yourusers about the goal of a survey and possible rewards In this section, we’ll share some tips that you can use for different types of surveys. They will help you create effective surveys. Use different types of questions. Asking the right questions is crucial foran effective and well-performing survey. Multiple-choice questions make it easy for users to take a survey since they don’t have to provide open-ended answers. Binary scale questions let customers choosefrom two available options, for example, yes or no.You can ask whetheryour customer support agent helped a client with their problem.This way, marketers receive objective and unambiguous answers. Semantic differential questions help companies evaluate users’ attitudes towards a particular issue or product. This survey uses a 5-7 point scale. Likert scale questions are similar to semantic questions. They help understand how clients feel about your product or service. Open-ended questions let users speak their minds. They are considered the most useful since customers can offer some innovative ideas. Keep your questions short. The longer the questions, the longer it will take to answer them. This may result in a high bounce rate,andthe survey won’t be as effective as you expected. Perhaps only your most loyal customers are ready to spend half an hour taking your survey, meaning you won’t get accurate results. Only ask the most important questions. You should have a clear goal for your surveyand make your questions bring you closer to it. For example, if you want to predict the success of a new product before its launch, you don’t need the questions like” What is your name?” and “How did you first come in contact with our brand?”. They won’t bring you value but will take more users’ time. Instead, create a list of the most critical questions. Try to make consistent scales and stick to one survey type. Avoid mixing several types of surveys and scales since it will confuse users. Say, you decided ona 5-point scale, and users should choose an option where 1 means “would never recommend,” while, in the next question, 1 stands for “very satisfied.” They may tickan answer by mistake, so be consistent. Stick to stylistically neutral words.Take into account that a big part of your respondents can be beginners who haven’t learned the professional terminology yet. Hence, avoid using abbreviations, acronyms, slang, and buzzwords not to confuse your users. Indicatehow much time the survey will take. Many users are skeptical about surveys since they tend to take a lot of time. Let them know how much time they need to take your survey. This will prevent you from survey abandonment. Inform your users about your survey goal and possible rewards. Users need a good reason to take your survey. Tell them that you want to improve your product and their answers are extremely valuable for your business. As an additional incentive, you can offer them a bonus, for example, a 10% discount on your product. Avoid promising a freebie since users won’t give sincere and objective answers in this case. Finally, we’ll provide several examples of customer satisfaction surveys for you to get inspired. Examples of Customer Satisfaction Surveys Here we’ll share different examples of customer surveys for you to choose the best one for your business. G2 asks its subscribers to answer only one question and assess how likely they are to recommend it to their friends from 0 to 10. After subscribers click on any number, they’re redirected to the survey and asked to explain their answer in detail. Then, the company wants to understand whether users are satisfied with its customer service. The last question is open-ended. Customers are asked how G2 can improve the process of buying software. Uber app asks both drivers and passengers about their experience after each ride. This way, both can see each other’s ratings before the next ride. Such a survey takes only several seconds and is highly effective. Chubbies need their customers’ opinions before designing new shorts. The brand also offers users a20% discount on its products as an incentive. In a nutshell, there are many types of surveys and questions you can use to interview your clients effectively. Let your audience take it via email with the help of LIKE.TG!

AI chatbot is a tool that applies artificial intelligence and natural language processing to provide customers with human-like conversations and relevant answers. It’s a useful software application that enables your company to ensure support at any stage of the customer journey and reduce the workload of your team. LIKE.TG allows you to build chatbots for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram and use ChatGPT integration. In this video, the LIKE.TG marketer Anya explains the difference between AI chatbots and rule-based chatbots. So, check it out to boost your customer service! In this article, we’ll unveil the difference between AI and rule-based chatbots and the benefits of AI chatbots. We’ll teach you how to use and build an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG. ChatGPT ChatGPT is a conversational AI platform that uses technology to understand clients’ questions and respond accurately in human language. The software enables you to provide instant, accurate, and natural answers to customers’ questions, recommend products based on customers’ needs, and update on relevant discounts and promotions. There are several types of ChatGPT you can use to solve specific issues. Some help analyze the context and generate more complex text or code. Others allow you to work with translation, complex classification, text sentiment analysis, and summarization tasks. You can create QA chatbots and provide instant answers to consumers’ questions. Besides, it helps you generate new text. The model understands text structures to create simple plots and titles. With ChatGPT, you can take your customer support and sales department to the next level. The software empowers your company to provide clients and leads with relevant answers without distracting team members from urgent tasks. The language and messages look human-like so users won’t feel the difference. ChatGPT provides answers based on messages’ history. ChatGPT lets you update clients on upcoming deals and discounts based on their shopping history. Messages are sent according to customers’ preferences; therefore, they are personalized. ChatGPT empowers you to increase customer satisfaction since consumers get their desired products. Now that you know some basic facts about ChatGPT, it’s time to clarify the difference between AI and rule-based chatbots. What is the difference between AI chatbots and chatbots? Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate the rule-based chatbots and AI chatbots because they can perform the same tasks. They can engage with users and answer basic questions. However, after testing these two types of chatbots, marketers report the rule-based chatbots’ inability to understand all customers’ inputs. Rule-based chatbots operate based on pre-written responses triggered when a user types the input. Sometimes the chatbot can interpret the answers in the wrong way and provide not accurate answers. AI chatbots use language processing functionalities and can understand the context of conversations with customers. The answers this type of chatbot provides are accurate and natural. They look human-like so clients can’t figure out they are dealing with a chatbot. The answers are generated from the knowledge base the chatbot is connected to. It can be trained based on previous conversations with clients. For instance, if the question is the same, the bot can use previous conversations as a source of information. To sum it up, AI chatbots can understand the context of the conversation and provide accurate answers. They are natural and human-like. After receiving responses from customer support, your clients will be satisfied with your company’s service. AI chatbots are trained based on the existing conversations with agents, while rule-based chatbots function based on pre-written scenarios. Now that you know the difference, let’s explore the main advantages of AI chatbots. Benefits of AI Chatbots AI chatbots can help you in various areas of your business. They enable you to reduce the workload on your customer support team and sales department. A trained AI chatbot can replace your customer support agents at anytime and provide instant answers. Since clients don’t have to wait for your customer agents to reply in hours or days, customer satisfaction with your brand improves. AI chatbots can be used for lead generation and qualification, increased sales, better customer engagement, and essential customer insights. We’ll cover all the benefits of AI chatbots in short. AI chatbots help provide support 24/7; use natural language to answer questions; look human alike when assisting customers; generate prospects; qualify leads; improve sales; gather information from customer data; improve customer support; boost satisfaction with your company; increase interactions with customers; reduce bounce rates; save costs on hiring more customer support agents; respond to clients’ inquiries faster; provide personalized recommendations based on customers’ preferences. Now that you know the pros, let’s jump into the next section to find out how to use an AI chatbot. How to use an AI chatbot? AI chatbots can be used in multiple areas: customer support, sales, online learning, and many others. It can provide answers and create written content (articles, social media posts, essays, code, and emails). AI chatbot can come in handy if you incorporate it right. In this section, we’ll unveil how to use a conversational AI chatbot for your company. If your team wants to work towards the success of your brand, you need to take care of several aspects. This type of chatbot is an AI-powered chatbot that doesn't require human supervision once everything is set up. However, before the process begins, you should complete several tasks. Let’s find out what you should do to implement your chatbot successfully. Create a knowledge base. If you want your chatbot to send logical and natural answers to customers, think about developing or improving your site’s knowledge base. A knowledge base is a web page on your company’s website that stores all the information about your product (guides, how-tos, instructions, etc.). When discussing AI chatbots, a knowledge base is data stored from all conversations. The chatbot becomes better and more accurate if it’s trained with conversations. The best way to teach your AI chatbot to provide natural and right answers is to have many conversations with clients. Your chatbot should also be connected to the knowledge base on your website. It’ll serve as an additional source of information for your chatbot. Once it receives a question from a user, it’ll search the knowledge base for the most detailed answers. AI chatbots can provide responses based on previous conversations with customer support agents. If your chatbot is already well-trained, you don’t need to take care of it and track every message. An AI chatbot will do everything for you. Connect your chatbot to a live chat. Since there’s still a possibility of a chatbot not understanding customer input, you need to prepare for such a scenario. For this purpose, we connect your AI chatbot to the live chat on your website. This way, if a chatbot cannot answer the question or provide the right response, the user can always talk to a live representative. For instance, you can automatically connect with a customer support agent after the chatbot gives two unclear answers. LIKE.TG empowers you to create a live chat and add it to your site within minutes. Prevent dissatisfaction with your brand and get ready with the live chat. Support customers when they need it the most and ensure that they get appropriate responses when necessary. Adjust AI chatbot answers. To make sure that your chatbot is giving the right and consistent answers, you need to audit it. Don’t let your chatbot operate on its own for months because you can’t know the answers it provides to customers and whether they are happy with them. Your top priority is customer satisfaction, so you need to take care of it. First, consider surveying to ask how happy your customers are with the chatbot. Secondly, look through the answers your AI chatbot usually provides to users. Thirdly, analyze them and find out whether the answers are appropriate and accurate. If everything is right, you don’t have to edit the answers. However, if the answers are not satisfying, there’s a need for improvement. Train your chatbot to provide new answers to questions to make clients happy with your chatbot. Now that you know the tasks you need to complete for an effective chatbot, let's create an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG. How to build an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG? When you consider creating a chatbot, it’s essential to find the right platform for it. Make sure that it doesn't require you to have programming or coding skills to create a chatbot. In LIKE.TG, you can develop a rule-based and AI chatbot within minutes without any special skills or knowledge. The process is simple and fast. With LIKE.TG visual builder, you can set up auto-replies and develop sales pipelines on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram. Create scenarios for various messengers or social media platforms and start conversations with customers whenever they need it. You can add a multi-channel subscription widget to convert visitors into clients. To set up a rule-based chatbot, create triggers that will start the flow. The platform will launch auto-replies and message flows once a user triggers a specific action. The next step is writing auto-replies. Based on the trigger, you need to develop different auto-replies that will be automatically sent out to clients. Then, you should create the logic of your bot. With LIKE.TG visual chatbot builder, you’ll only need to drag and drop the necessary messages and triggers and connect them. Connect messages one by one to establish a sequence of messages in your auto-reply flow. Once everything is done, you need to double-check your chatbot. Use test mode to do it. If the bot works right, feel free to launch your chatbot. Below you can see how to work in the LIKE.TG editor. LIKE.TG has an integration with ChatGPT. It means that your bot communicates with clients in a human-like manner. Its answers look natural. The answers will also be more accurate since the bot analyzes previous conversations to understand customers’ inputs. LIKE.TG allows you to create chatbots using four main models: Curie, Davinci, Ada, and Babbage. The model you choose depends on your main business purpose. Some of them are designed to optimize texts, others can decrypt codes. So you need to select the type wisely after you determine your main goal. If you want to optimize texts, consider using the Ada model. You’ll be able to identify keywords, proofread your text, or optimize it to comply with SEO principles. Below is an example of an Ada model chatbot created in LIKE.TG. If you need a FAQ database, consider using the Davinci model. With LIKE.TG, you can train your bot to provide relevant and accurate answers to customers’ questions regarding a product or service. Below, you can see an example of such a model. The service enables you to create a helper bot. It will allow you to solve life issues fast with a chatbot. Users can describe their situations in the bot, and it will send them relevant solutions or advice. Below is an example of the Davinci model for such a chatbot. ChatGPT is a new level of support for customers. Besides customer support, you can perform multiple actions using this conversational chatbot. Relevant, natural, and human-like are the words to describe the help you can provide to customers without the intervention of your agents. Register with LIKE.TG to create quality AI chatbots for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp.