In such a scenario to stay ahead in the long race, developing an effective eCommerce growth strategy is important, and it should be aligned with customer preferences and their buying behavior. Your eCommerce business strategy must combine the latest technologies such as AI, innovation, adaptability, and practical planning.

Sound complicated? Don’t worry. If you want to know how to expand the online business then you are at the right place. Here today I will discuss, what an eCommerce growth strategy is, why it’s important, and the best 10 ways to get it right.

So, keep reading this space to know more!

What is an eCommerce Growth Strategy?

An eCommerce business strategy is a set of comprehensive strategies and activities that outlines how an eCommerce business can achieve its goals: selling products online, eventually growing its business, and staying ahead of others in the digital marketplace. This strategy covers different aspects of the eCommerce business operations including customer support, sales, marketing, technology, logistics, etc. 

The goal of an eCommerce business strategy is to maximize revenue, profitability, and market share while delivering value to customers and maintaining operational efficiency. It involves analyzing market trends, understanding customer needs and preferences, identifying growth opportunities, and developing actionable plans to capitalize on those opportunities effectively.

Why You Need to Build an eCommerce Business Growth Strategy

Having a road map is always helpful for making your business successful. Here is not an exception. Having a clear growth strategy for your eCommerce business helps you to have a clear vision of how to proceed further. Its benefits include:

• Company Stability

An eCommerce business development strategy works as a blueprint for new product launches, upgrades, campaigns or even targeting a new customer segment. You can get new customers as well as turn one-time clients into loyal ones.

Your eCommerce strategy covers everything from marketing and customer service to sales. It gives you an idea about website traffic or even monthly revenue. You get the info about why website visitors are dropping and how to get back on track. In short, it helps you to have a stable company with happy and satisfied team members. 

• Being Better than Others

As a part of the eCommerce growth strategy, you need to do competitor research to understand what extra they are offering and how you can improve your product offerings to stay ahead of the competition. With research, you can create your unique value proposition and offer your customers what exactly they want. 

• Cost Efficiency

Your business growth strategy helps you to save costs on different segments. It enables you to optimize tech stack, inventory management, supply chain procedures, costings, and productivity to serve customers in a better way. 

• Understanding Your Target Audience

Improving your online store can be tough if you’re not sure what’s going well and what’s not. But with eCommerce growth tactics, you can see data about your target audience, their buying behavior, and preferences. This info helps you figure out what needs fixing so you can make your online store better.

• Increased Sales Conversions

In an online business, you aim to make money. A well-thought-out structured growth plan helps to pinpoint inefficiencies and provides exceptional online shopping experience and top-notch customer service that increases sales conversions. 

• Customer Retention

Studies indicate that it costs more money to get a new customer than to keep one you already have. Having an eCommerce plan helps turn one-time buyers into regular customers who pick your brand among other options. 

• Getting New Customers

You can properly strategize in such a way that new customers land on your eCommerce website and purchase from you. Just like retaining old customers, it helps to gain new ones also. 

Things to Keep in Mind Before Building Your eCommerce Growth Strategy

Building a successful eCommerce growth strategy requires careful planning and consideration of various factors. Here are some key things to keep in mind before you start creating one.

• Reframe Your Core Values

A mission statement is like a company’s heart—it shows what it believes in, why it exists, and what it promises to do. Making one can steer your business choices in the right direction and can also help tell people about your business in a good way. People prefer to buy from companies they believe in, even if it costs a bit more.

• Future Business Objectives

Decide first what is the objective of your eCommerce brand. Understanding what you want to achieve in one, ten, or even 20 years will help you to develop the right roadmap for your business.

Instead of focusing on short-term goals, look broad. Otherwise, you may miss out on big investment plans that can be beneficial for you in the long run. 

• Preferred Clientele and Market Segment

If you don’t know who are your target customers and have not segmented the target market, you are in trouble. Because they are the ones who are going to buy your products and for them only you have developed your product offerings.

Pause before jumping into creating a growth plan. Understand the needs, pain points, preferences, and buying patterns of your target customers. Once you get all that data, develop a solid eCommerce business strategy based on that. 

• Client Requirements 

Once you know who buys from you, you can go even further to figure out what they need and like. There are many tools and techniques to do this such as by looking at numbers on Google Analytics or just by asking them questions in a survey. This will help you understand your customers better, so you can make smarter decisions for your online store.

• Customer Touchpoints

You need to visualize the buyer’s journey from beginning to end. This will help you to make changes if required to streamline the whole process and make it a smooth journey for your customers.

One way to do it is by creating a flow chart detailing the marketing funnel where all the necessary steps are added that a customer needs to take in the journey- starting from knowing about your brand to becoming your repeated customer. It has to be specific and detailed to understand all major interactions that will happen between your brand and the buyers. 

• Omnichannel Approach

Customers have their preferred mode of communication. It can be email, phone, live chat, chatbot, or maybe social media channels. To serve them better you have to be available on each of these platforms and manage all the interactions efficiently. You also need to be careful that the messaging is consistent everywhere otherwise it may create confusion.

So, taking the omnichannel approach is important if you want your eCommerce brand to do well in the competition.

Top 10 Strategies for eCommerce Success

It’s been nearly 4 years since the onset of COVID-19. Most of the companies have successfully partially shifted to online for catering to the high customer demands. To make this transition sustainable, you need to manage many important aspects carefully like the proper technology, infrastructure, right team recruitment, shipping, and billing.

To make things perfect, and stand strong in the huge competition you need to develop a strong eCommerce growth strategy. Here are the 10 important tactics for your kind consideration. These techniques will help you boost interaction, and improve conversion rates, and business growth.

1. Improve User Experience

The shopping experience has to be seamless and delightful. Customers should feel good while browsing your online store. So choose a good eCommerce platform, and make your website easy to access, user-friendly, and visually appealing. Also remember to optimize it for both desktop, tab, and mobile.

How can you do it? Here are some tips for you!

• Create a mobile-friendly website.
• Make sure the website loads fast.
• Upload high-quality videos and images.
• Provide accurate product descriptions.
• Offer different payment modes.
• The checkout process has to be easy and simple.
• Conduct A/B testing on a regular basis to identify areas for improvement
• Display user-generated reviews and ratings prominently on product pages to build trust and credibility. 
• Offer personalized product recommendations through data analytics.

2. Adopt a Multichannel Strategy

The multichannel approach is super important nowadays. Besides your website, think about selling on social media and other online marketplaces. This helps you reach more people. When you sell in these different places, make sure your brand looks the same everywhere. This helps you to gain customer trust.

Here’s how to do it: 

• Use different marketing channels to tell your target audience about the product offerings.
• Keep an eye on the sales for each of those platforms.
• Utilize data analytics to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends across different channels.
• Implement an efficient inventory management system to prevent overselling and maintain stock availability across all channels.
• Tailor your marketing campaigns for each channel to maximize engagement and conversions.

3. Data-Driven Insights are Important

Yes, you can say data is the most important thing to consider in your eCommerce growth tactics. It gives you detailed insights into customer demographics, buying behavior, and preferences so that you can personalize your offerings. Not only that, detailed analytics helps you to tweak your sales, and marketing strategies, and optimize inventory management for better results.

Pro Tips:

• Collect detailed reports from your website, different campaigns, surveys, and client interactions.
• Opt for the best reporting tools to get detailed reports.
• Go through the customer data for audience segmentation based on their geographic locations, buying behavior, and preferences.
• Utilize purchase history and browsing behavior data to provide personalized product recommendations.
• Employ dynamic pricing strategies based on real-time market data.
• Utilize website and user behavior analytics to identify and address bottlenecks in the conversion funnel.

4. Invest in Customer Support

Customers need instant assistance with their queries. Providing exceptional customer support has to be in your growth strategy if you want your online business to go long. Apart from traditional phone and email support, offer real-time assistance through live chat and AI chatbot.

Live chat tools for your eCommerce business offer instant assistance to your customers on the web, mobile, and other social media platforms. It lets your agents monitor customers in real time and proactively engage with them to offer assistance before they ask for it.

AI-powered eCommerce chatbots are great options when you want to automate different business operations including customer service. It can handle multiple customer interactions simultaneously 24/7 even after your business hours. 

How to choose the best live chat solution for your business? Here’s one checklist for you!

• Opt for a platform that is intuitive and user-friendly for both your team members and customers.
• The software should enable you to customize the chat widget to match the look and feel of your website.
• Consider a live chat solution that supports multiple channels.
• Ensure the live chat software is mobile-friendly and offers apps or responsive design for agents and customers who prefer to chat on mobile devices.
• Ensure that it offers all the advanced features required.
• The chat solution should offer robust analytics and reporting tools to track chat performance, monitor agent productivity, and gather insights into customer behavior and preferences.

5. Optimize Your eCcommerce Website

To increase sales conversions, you need to optimize your eCommerce website. It helps to bring in more and more visitors and gives you a great opportunity to turn them into paying customers. Suppose you are getting 50,000 visitors to your website from Facebook, but the website takes too much time to load. In that case, you are going to lose many of them. Such kind of bad experience will make you lose lots of prospects no matter how much you invest in other marketing and sales campaigns.

 How to optimize the website? Here are some tips for you!

• Develop a mobile-friendly website for a seamless browsing and purchasing experience.
• Offer various payment options.
• Use clear and high-quality pictures and videos to show off your products from various angles.
• Write interesting and detailed descriptions for your products.
• Offer an easy checkout process.
• Display customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials prominently on your product pages to build trust and credibility.

6. Enhance Store Visibility through SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you to get a higher rank in the search results when users type keywords (different phrases that they search to get details) related to your business. Getting a higher rank there gives you more and more visitors to your online store.

Let me give you one example here. Suppose you have an eCommerce website for designer clothes and accessories. One special segment in your collection is vintage hats and you want more and more people coming to that specific page.

So, with SEO you need to optimize the page using the keyword ‘vintage hats’ so that when people type with that keyword, your page will come in the top results and customers visit that page to know more about it and finally buy that product.

I have some SEO tips for you!

• Conduct thorough SEO research to find keywords that are relevant to your business or product offerings.
• The selected keywords should not be highly competitive.
• Your keywords should have a higher number of search volumes per
• Aren’t highly competitive (i.e., low keyword difficulty)
• The keywords should have a monthly high number of search volumes.
• Develop high-quality, engaging content such as blog posts, product guides, and tutorials that incorporate targeted keywords.
• Use descriptive filenames and alt tags for your product images to improve their visibility in image search results.
• Ensure that your eCommerce website is optimized for mobile devices, as Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in search results.

7. Email Marketing 

We all get thousands of emails every day so do your target customers. But do we open all of them? Not exactly. You need to make them open yours. How? Through attractive subject lines and email content. So, write catchy headlines, and add high-quality pictures, useful content, and social proofs in a beautiful template. Also, you need to have an email sequence that should be sent to customers at various stages of their buying journey to get the maximum results.

 Pro Tips:

• Organize your email list into groups based on factors like geographic locations, purchase history, browsing behavior, or engagements.
• Use personalization techniques to make your email content more relevant and engaging to individual subscribers.
• Set up automated email workflows.
• Launch email campaigns to promote sales, discounts, special offers, and new product launches.
• Design visually appealing and mobile-responsive email templates.

8. Customer Loyalty Program

Arranging a loyalty program is one of the best marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses. It always helps you to retain more and more customers. It’s a great idea to reward your customers for their repeat purchases. it makes them feel valued and motivated to do more business with you. The rewards can be anything from bonuses, and free samples to exclusive deals.

An excellent example is makeup brand Sephora’s ‘Beauty Pass’. They have a loyalty system where customers get better rewards as they spend more money.

Some loyalty program ideas:

• Points-based system
• Surprise on special occasions
• VIP membership
• Personalized offers
• Exclusive events invites
• Referral program
• Birthday rewards

9. Strong Social Media Presence

Nearly 82% of people use social media platforms for online shopping so always be available where your customers are. Your social media presence will help you to reach more prospects, increase brand awareness, and boost sales conversions. Apart from that, the more you interact with them on diverse platforms the more you will get to know about their likes, dislikes, and buying behavior. It’s a great way to develop a long-lasting relationship with them. It helps you to retain your existing customers as well as attract new ones.

Many brands use social media for brand awareness and sales. Milk Bar is one such example. Before COVID-19, Milk Bar, a bakery chain in the U.S, made most of its money (75%) from its stores. They also got 25% from online sales. But when COVID-19 came, they could lose most of their money. To prevent this, its founder Christina Tosi, started using Instagram to advertise.

Now, Milk Bar’s Instagram has 870K followers. They also bring many visitors to their online store through social media.

10. Influencer Marketing Initiatives

Well, influencer marketing is a trending concept nowadays. What is that? Individuals who have a significant following and influence on social media platforms promote your brand. These people, known as influencers, promote your products or services to their audience, leveraging their credibility and reach to drive engagement, traffic, and sales for your brand. Influencer marketing often involves partnerships between brands and influencers, where the influencer creates content featuring the brand’s products or services and shares it with their followers.

Teaming up with such popular people in your field can help your online business grow a lot.

Here’s how to do it:

• Define specific objectives for your influencer marketing campaigns.
• Find influencers who match your customers.
• Work with them to advertise your products.
• Keep an eye on how well your influencer ads are doing.
• Build genuine connections with influencers rather than viewing them solely as a means for promotion.

How REVE Chat Can Help You Out!

To retain customers, increase engagement, and improve sales conversion, you need to offer excellent customer support. This is one of the most important aspects of your eCommerce growth strategy. REVE Chat can be the perfect fit for you here.

REVE Chat serves as your comprehensive hub for all customer service needs. As an omnichannel AI-powered customer service software, it facilitates instant support across your website, mobile apps, and various social media platforms including Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

This platform allows you to monitor visitors on the web or mobile apps in real time along with insights into their browsing patterns and current page views. Leveraging this data, you can personalize your communication and proactively engage with users, providing instant assistance even before they express a need.

Moreover, REVE Chat offers a smart AI chatbot capable of automating numerous business operations, including customer service. This ensures round-the-clock customer assistance, even beyond regular business hours or during peak support agent activity.

With advanced features like co-browsing, voice/video chat capabilities, a ticketing system, canned responses, and detailed reports, REVE Chat empowers businesses to elevate their customer support experience.

Curious to experience its benefits? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial today and witness firsthand how REVE Chat can revolutionize your customer service approach.

If you’re not happy with your sales process, you should invest in sales optimization. It will help your team in connecting with new customers and closing deals consistently.

Even if you think your sales process is good, you should still invest in optimization. Why? Because things change. What works today might not work tomorrow. You have to keep updating and improving your sales approach to stay ahead of the competition.

In this blog, we’ll talk more about what sales optimization is, its benefits, the 10 best strategies, and important tools to help you succeed.

What is Sales Process Optimization?

Sales process optimization is about making your company’s sales process better, faster, and more flexible. It means looking closely at each step of selling, from finding potential customers to closing deals and making it work better for the people buying your products.

Usually, it involves looking at information collected over time to find small ways to make things better in the long run. When we say “data,” we mean all sorts of information, like how often we win sales through different methods, how many calls each salesperson makes, or how big our deals are in different places.

There are two main ways to do this: top-down and bottom-up. In a top-down way, a boss keeps a close eye on these numbers and helps salespeople who need it. In the bottom-up way, everyone on the sales team learns how to understand and use these numbers themselves, so they can do a better job on their own. The second way is not only better for the boss’s stress levels but also for how happy the whole team is.

Importance of Sales Optimization

Certainly, competition is higher than ever nowadays. Gone are the times when salespeople relied on long lists of phone numbers, often not targeted toward any specific demographics. They would make calls and deliver sales pitches, only to be met with rude hang-ups most of the time.

Thankfully, things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays, salespeople have access to a wealth of information right at their fingertips. Many helpful sales tools make it much easier to identify potential customers before reaching out to them for a sales chat.

In this situation, to stay ahead of the competition, you need to put extra effort into improving your sales approach and increasing the conversion rate. Here’s why you should consider sales optimization:

• Adaptability: Optimization allows your sales process to evolve with changing customer behaviors and market trends, ensuring your business remains competitive.
• Data-Driven Decisions: By analyzing data related to sales activities, you can make informed decisions to enhance performance and maximize results.
• Enhanced Team Morale: Empowering your sales team with the tools and knowledge to monitor and improve their own performance will boost their morale and motivation.
• Financial Benefits: When sales teams study past sales processes and try out new strategies, they can sell more, which means they’ll make more money.
• Improved Lead Management: As a part of making sales better, it’s important to manage the leads in a better way and find ways for improvement. This helps to build stronger relationships with customers by identifying and fixing any issues in the sales process.

Top 10 Sales Optimization Strategies to Look Into

How do you optimize your sales process to get the optimal results? Well, there are many smart strategies that you can follow. Here’s a checklist for you. 

1. Set Long-Term Goals

First, set what you want to achieve in the long run. Instead of thinking about short-term wins, try to think big and focus on something called quality.

All business owners aim for higher sales revenue every year, but shorter wins will not give you bigger revenue. Remedy? Create a healthy sales culture and think about what best you can do for your customers. Instead of having parties for hitting monthly targets, celebrate client anniversaries or successful upsells.

2. Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) is like making a detailed sketch of the perfect customer for your business. This sketch helps you know exactly who to target with your sales efforts. This profile serves as a blueprint for targeting and acquiring high-quality leads and ultimately driving sales.

It’s smarter to focus on creating a lasting connection with the right customers instead of going after quick wins that don’t last long. When you create a detailed buyer persona, you dig beyond basic details like their age or location such as:

• Their preferences
• Any concerns they might have (and how you can address them)
• Buying patterns
• Their gender, income, education etc.
• Preferred communication channels
• Lifestyles

3. Find Loopholes in Your Sales Pipeline

Find out what problems you are having in the sales pipeline. It can be not getting enough quality leads, a very low conversion rate, or issues with cross-selling and upselling. No matter what the problem is you have to identify to fix that.

The sales pipeline is the roadmap that helps move potential customers along the path to making a purchase. So, if there are gaps or problems in your pipeline, you might lose out on sales.

Many sales managers keep a close eye on the start and end points of the pipeline. It’s important to carefully monitor how new potential customers entering the pipeline to sales are made. But it’s also crucial to understand what’s happening in the middle stages. You need to know what’s going on there too.

4. Make Sure the Sales and Marketing Teams Work Together

The main job of both marketing and sales teams is to boost sales revenue, but often they find it challenging to collaborate effectively. It’s essential for them to always cooperate to achieve the best results.

A report by Marketo says that half of the leads generated by marketing are ignored by sales reps. Also, MarketingProfs discovered that when sales and marketing work closely together, businesses have better customer retention rates (36% higher) and win more sales (38% higher).

How to bring in the alignment? Here are some tips for you!

• Ensure open lines of communication between sales and marketing teams.
• Both teams should work together to map out the customer’s path and identify touchpoints where they can collaborate effectively.
• Offer opportunities for sales and marketing team members to learn about each other’s roles, challenges, and perspectives.
• Define common metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that both sales and marketing teams are accountable for.
• Foster a culture of collaboration by organizing joint strategy sessions, brainstorming meetings.

5. Take Good Care of Your Leads

It’s a very important sales optimization strategy aimed at guiding potential customers through the sales process and converting them into paying customers.

The process begins with lead generation, where potential customers are identified and attracted to your products or services through various marketing channels such as social media, email campaigns, content marketing, and events. Here the goal is to keep leads engaged and moving through the sales funnel by providing them with the information and support they need to make informed purchasing decisions.

Taking good care of leads means getting to know your potential customers better and building stronger connections. If a salesperson contacts a prospect too early or tries to sell them something they’re not interested in yet, they might lose that opportunity before they’ve even had a chance to engage with them.

Teaching your sales team about your ideal customer, targeting the right potential customers through marketing, and understanding how customers behave before they become your customers are the three main ways to improve lead nurturing. 

6. Find Small Successes to Get Close to Big Ones

You need to achieve small things to get the big ones. Sales is no exception. Never see it as a win-or-lose game. You have to plan and strategize to win big deals. Apart from that, a series of small deals will help to reach closer to the big ones. 

So, if you want to sell more and make more money, it’s important to find and make the most of every little success in your sales process. By doing this, you can make your sales process quicker, make sure everyone in your team knows what they’re doing, and get revenue faster.

7. Encourage Your Sales Team

You can encourage your sales team in 2 ways. One is through motivation and the second one will be through empowerment. Motivating the sales team involves providing incentives, recognition, and rewards for their hard work and achievements. This could be in the form of bonuses, commissions, or public acknowledgment of their successes.

Empowering sales reps means giving them the tools, resources, and training they need to excel in their roles. This could involve providing effective sales training, access to helpful sales tools and technology, and the autonomy to make decisions and take actions that will drive sales.

Sales cycle optimization is the smart way to make your sales team better. This helps them sell more and be more successful.

8. Use Automation for Sales 

Sales optimization strategy involves automating some of your sales processes whenever you can. This means using technology to handle tasks like sending emails, tracking leads, and updating customer information automatically, without needing a person to do it manually. This saves time and allows your sales team to focus on more important tasks like selling and building relationships with customers.

Numerous sales tools are available in the market to automate and streamline general tasks and processes. With such a tool, you can figure out which tasks your reps do over and over again and then set up the tool to do those tasks automatically. This makes the work smoother and saves time for everyone.

9. Territory Management

It’s one of the most important parts of sales performance optimization. Territory management means dividing sales regions among your team members strategically. Each salesperson gets their territory to focus on, allowing them to build relationships and understand the needs of customers in that area. By managing territories effectively, you can ensure better coverage, prevent overlap, and maximize regional sales opportunities.

There are numerous benefits which include:

• Territory management helps salespeople focus on certain areas, so they know the customers there really well. 
• Clear territory boundaries prevent conflicts and overlaps between sales representatives. 
• They can develop stronger relationships with customers in their assigned territories, leading to increased trust, loyalty, and satisfaction.
• Having territories also makes it simpler to track how well sales are going in each area, so you can figure out how to do even better.

10. Keep an Eye on Sales Data

All the strategies mentioned here are important but this one you should not ignore. You have to track and understand the data and analytics to get an idea about what’s going on and find out the loopholes if any for further improvements.

Yes, you can manually track the data in some cases but not everywhere. It will be very time-consuming and complex. To help you out here, there are many sales tools available in the market to choose from that can make the whole process much easier for you.

Many of these tools use a combination of AI and behavioral science to turn that data into high-impact, actionable insights that will help you refine every aspect of your sales cycle. You can get detailed insights on how your sales agents are performing, which sections in the sales pipeline are getting more importance, tasks that can be automated, the list goes on….

You will discuss these tools in more detail in the next part! 

Top 8 Sales Optimization Tools that Help to Convert

Yes, sales optimization tools offer many great features that are beneficial to optimize your complete sales journey. This is the reason, why more and more companies have started using them a lot. But with so many choices available, how do you know which one is best for your business?

To make it easier for you, we’ve put together a list.

1. REVE Chat

REVE Chat stands out as a top-notch omnichannel sales and customer engagement platform that you can consider for your business. It allows you to monitor how your target customers interact across various platforms like your website, mobile app, and social media channels such as Facebook, Viber, Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp in real-time.

With REVE Chat, your team can proactively engage with potential customers on their preferred platforms and offer instant assistance before they even request it. What’s great is that you can manage all these communications from one central location.

Additionally, REVE Chat offers an intelligent AI chatbot that automates many of your business operations, including customer support. This frees up your sales and support team to focus on more complex tasks, while the chatbot handles multiple customers simultaneously, 24/7. It’s highly recommended for businesses looking to enhance their customer engagement and streamline operations.

Core Features:

• Automate a variety of sales tasks, including customer service, using the REVE Chatbot.
• Provide personalized experiences to potential and existing customers through live chat, voice, and video chat.
• Centralize all social media interactions for a seamless customer experience.
• Effectively coordinate and monitor team performance to meet sales goals.
• Gain comprehensive insights into your business and sales team performance with key metrics on website visitors, customer charts, and agent performance.
• Also offers a smart ticketing system that links live chat with ticketing to solve visitor and customer problems quickly and smoothly.

Want to experience REVE Chat firsthand? Try out its unique features through a 14-day FREE TRIAL. Sign Up today!

2. Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing and sales platform that offers a wide range of tools and features to help businesses improve their online visibility, sales, and performance. It provides solutions for search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, social media management, and competitive research.

 Semrush helps you attract more people to your website and find great sales leads by creating precise and focused content. It’s worth checking out later.

 Core Features:

• Helps you to identify relevant keywords for the website content and advertising campaigns, as well as analyze keyword trends and search volume.
• Allows to conduct comprehensive audits of websites to identify and fix issues that may affect SEO performance.
• Provides insights into competitors’ online strategies, including their organic and paid search tactics, top-performing keywords, and advertising budgets.
• Offers tools for content creation, optimization, and distribution, as well as content performance tracking.

3. Freshsales

Freshsales is a customer relationship management (CRM) software developed to help companies manage and streamline their sales processes more effectively. It offers a range of features to streamline sales activities, improve customer interactions, and increase revenue.

Freshsales offers built-in features like email, phone, live chat, and telephony, which help sales teams save time by automating tasks and enhancing their efficiency each day.

Core Features:

• Allows businesses to store and organize customer contact information, interactions, and communication history in one centralized database.
• Helps businesses capture, qualify, and prioritize leads, as well as track their progress through the sales pipeline.
• Enables sales teams to manage sales opportunities, track deals, and forecast revenue accurately.
• Provides tools for sending personalized emails, tracking email interactions, and automating follow-up actions.
• Allows businesses to visualize and manage their sales pipeline, customize sales stages, and track the progress of deals.

4. ClickPoint 

ClickPoint is a software designed to help businesses manage their leads more effectively. It offers features like lead tracking, lead scoring, lead routing, and automation tools to streamline the lead management process. Additionally, the software provides analytics and reporting capabilities to track lead performance and optimize lead generation strategies.

This software matches your salespeople with the trickier or more important potential customers, making it more likely that you’ll get better results. Also, it gives details about sales actions and has been proven to make closing deals faster.

Core Features:

•  Helps businesses capture, organize, and prioritize leads effectively.
• Automatically assigns leads to the appropriate sales representatives based on predefined criteria, such as location or lead score.
• Allows businesses to monitor the progress of leads through the sales pipeline, from initial contact to conversion.
• Streamlines repetitive sales tasks, such as follow-up emails or appointment scheduling, to improve efficiency.
• Provides insights into sales performance, lead conversion rates, and other key metrics to help in decision-making and optimization strategies.

5. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is a great sales process optimization software that does everything for marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s made to help businesses work better, get more people interested, and turn those people into customers. With HubSpot, you can keep an eye on potential customers and get detailed insights into their activities and busing behavior. It also helps you automate your sales process easily. HubSpot offers great customer service and lots of features to pick from.

Core Features:

• HubSpot offers a free CRM that helps businesses organize, track, and nurture their leads and customers effectively.
• Your sales teams can track email opens, clicks, and replies, and create personalized email sequences to engage leads and prospects at the right time.
• The deal management features allow sales teams to track deals through the sales pipeline, set reminders, and forecast revenue accurately.
• Automates repetitive tasks such as follow-up emails, task creation, and lead assignment.
• Provides detailed sales reports and analytics.

6. LeadSquared

LeadSquared is a good cloud-based sales process optimization software that helps businesses with marketing and managing customer relationships. It offers tools to bring in potential customers, interact with them well, and turn them into paying customers.

This software makes tasks like capturing leads, handling marketing and sales activities, and tracking results easier. It also provides features like scoring leads, creating landing pages, and giving detailed insights into team performances. Plus, it lets different team members access the information they need based on their roles.

Core Features:

• Helps in capturing potential customers’ information through various channels like forms, emails, and social media.
• Automates several marketing tasks.
• Provides a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system tailored for sales teams.
• Offers reporting tools to track campaign performance, lead quality, and sales metrics.
• Assigns scores to leads based on their behavior and engagement. 

7. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a comprehensive solution that helps businesses effectively manage their customer relationships, streamline sales processes, and drive growth. It offers tools for automating various aspects of the sales process, including lead management, pipeline management, and sales forecasting. Furthermore, Zoho CRM seamlessly integrates with more than 500 business applications making things much easier for you.

Core Features:

• Zoho CRM allows you to centralize and manage all your contacts and leads in one place.
• Offers automation features to streamline the sales process, including lead management, pipeline management, and sales forecasting.
• Zoho CRM integrates with most of the marketing tools.
• Provides built-in analytics and reporting tools to track sales performance, monitor key metrics, and gain insights into customer behavior. 

8. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell is a sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software developed by Zendesk, designed to help sales teams manage their customer relationships and drive sales growth. It is easy to configure and very user-friendly. You can customize Zendesk Sell to fit all your specific sales processes and workflows. This includes creating custom fields, sales stages, and workflows tailored to your specific requirements. 

Core Features:

• Provides a centralized database for managing contacts, leads, and accounts.
• Offers tools for visualizing and managing the sales pipeline. 
• Automates repetitive tasks such as data entry, lead scoring, and email follow-ups. 
• You can track the sales activities, including calls, emails, meetings, and other tasks.
• Includes lead and deal scoring features to prioritize leads and opportunities based on their likelihood of conversions.

Opt for Sales Process Optimization to Get the Best Results

Yes, by now you have understood why it’s so important to optimize your sales strategies. Improving how you sell doesn’t happen fast or just once. Good sales teams keep working on their methods to grow over time. They even use different sales optimization tools based on their specific requirements and budget. 

REVE Chat is a great tool for both big and small enterprises that want to offer great customer experience and boost their online sales. To know more about it, click HERE.

There has to be a system through which you will understand who are the prospective customers for your business. Also, all of your prospects may not behave the same with your brand. Some of them may behave indifferently, show less interest in your product offerings, or may not be the right segment to market to. There will be different techniques to handle them. 

To help you identify the right ones for your business, today I will discuss what the prospective customers look like and how to turn them into your clients. 

What is a Prospective Customer?

In simple terms, the prospect or prospective customer is a business or person who is interested in a service or product but has not paid for it yet.

The interest can be shown through different ways like:

• Signing up for a free trial, newsletter, or regular updates through emails
• Going through the company website
• Interested to know more about the product offerings.

In the early stage of a buyer’s journey, the prospect explores different brand options to choose from and decides if he wants to connect with a specific business or not. Remember, one thing! The prospects are not your customers yet but you have to identify them at the first stage itself to develop your marketing and sales strategies effectively.

For instance, Reebok aims to attract potential customers with higher incomes. They want to be seen as a premium brand, and their products often cost more than the average in the market. Their prospects are sports personnel and individuals who value a healthy, active lifestyle and can purchase their products.

Prospective Vs Potential Customers

‘Prospective’ and ‘Potential’ are terms often used interchangeably, but they carry slightly different nuances in certain contexts.

The basic difference between these two terms is- willingness. It means how likely the individual or business wants to be moved through your sales process. To distinguish a person or business as your potential customer, you must have set some parameters. The potential customer can buy your product but may not be interested in purchasing something from you at that moment. The term “potential” often implies a broader category, encompassing a larger audience that hasn’t necessarily been actively identified or engaged by the business yet.

On the other hand, a prospective customer has the intent to buy. For that reason, he will get in touch with your brand and initiate a conversation to know more. Such individuals are more likely to be converted into your clients. 

Differences Between a Prospect and a Lead

Prospective customers and leads both terms refer to potential clients. They show interest in your company’s products, but there are five main differences:

1. A prospective customer is closer to making a deal in the sales process than a lead.
2. A prospective customer has fewer doubts or negativity about your product.
3. A prospect is more loyal to your product offerings than a lead.
4. Leads collect information, while prospects actively engage with a company through emails, live chat, phone calls, or meetings.
5. In terms of communication, businesses handle multiple leads simultaneously, but with prospects, they focus on individual, one-on-one communication.

Basic Characteristics of Prospective Customers

How to identify the prospective customers? Well, they have specific characteristics by which we can differentiate them from the rest. Here are a few!

• They Know about Their Pain Points

When faced with a challenge, our immediate instinct is to seek a way out promptly. In this situation, we become prospects for companies offering solutions to our specific problems. Convincing these prospects becomes relatively easier if you can demonstrate a clear understanding of their pain points and present an ideal solution.

For others, the process is more intricate. It requires diligent effort to educate them about their challenges and illustrate how your product or service is helpful. This process is lengthier but essential for building conviction and trust.

• They Know You Have the Way-Out

Did you know that 62% of customers prefer to hear from companies about what they are offering and how the services can work to solve their issues? This means your sales team should know the product well to suggest a solution that fits what customers need. So arrange product training regularly.

As a business owner, you can’t fix every customer problem. So, remember that your product or service can be the solution to what a customer is facing.

• They Show Interest 

As the prospective customers are in search of solutions to their challenges, they are anyways interested in buying your products. It’s easier to crack the deals here. They may get in touch with your company over a phone call, live chat, visit your website, or connect on other social media platforms to learn more about your offerings. 

• They Engage with Your Marketing Activities

Understand one thing, the prospects are half-convinced to buy from you. Due to this, they will easily engage with your marketing activities. They may sign up for a free trial, or newsletters, fill in a form, and ask for more details to understand your offerings in a better way.

So, engage with each one of them and hear them out. Lastly, show them how your product works to solve their issues. 

• They Have the Ability to Buy Your Product

You might meet someone interested in your solution because they know there’s a problem you can fix. But, they might not have enough money to buy what you’re offering.

Did you know that 58% of customers prefer talking about the cost upfront? Surprisingly, only 23% of salespeople do this. To avoid wasting time on a sale that won’t work out, it’s smart for salespeople to bring up prices early. If the customer has a budget, then he could be a great potential customer.

• They Trust Your Brand

Now, you have to work hard on this. Earning credibility and loyalty is important for your brand if you want to be in the long run. We all do business with companies whom we trust. To achieve this, keep working consistently on your brand through content marketing, customer reviews, and success stories. Plan how to encourage people to talk positively about your business, so you stay in the minds of potential customers.

How to Approach Your Potential Clients?

There are many potential customers out there for your brand but remember all of them are not the prospects.

About half of the potential customers whom businesses target end up not being a good match. In other words, companies spend a lot of resources on people who are not the right fit. To avoid wasting time and money, begin by figuring out which prospects could become your best customers. Here are some of the best methods to help you with that.

• Examine Your Customer Demographics

You might already be aware that not every customer is equally important. According to Pareto’s rule, around 20% of your customers usually bring in about 80% of your profits. While newer calculations may vary a bit, the main idea remains the same: focusing on a smaller group of customers tends to bring in a bigger share of the profits.

So, understand what your existing customers experience with your product. Make a list of your good customers and find out the common factors among them. They must be coming from the same background, financial capabilities, preferences, or choices. So, when you will find out the prospective customers, look for these specific characteristics. 

Also, you can talk to your customer support team and they handle thousands of new users every day. They can tell you about the common concern, what they are looking for in your service etc. All these together help you to make new strategies to attract new customers. 

• Establish an Online Footprint

Available online! This is one of the best ways to attract new prospective clients. Today’s tech-savvy users mostly rely on the web to do business. Even we also research on the net about a product, read reviews, and check out the website to get an idea about it before making the final decision.

Develop a user-friendly and visually appealing website that showcases your products or services. Include essential information such as your company’s story, offerings, contact details, and testimonials. Ensure your website is optimized for search engines to increase visibility. And finally create and maintain a strong presence on relevant social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Share valuable content, engage with your audience, and use it as a platform to showcase your expertise and build trust.

• Recognize Key Decision-Makers

Prospect customers and decision markers can be the same individual or business or may be different. You have to understand this first. For example, you are the sales representative for a software company, and you want to approach a prospect, suppose XYZ Corporation, to sell your project management software. Here you might recognize key decision-makers because they are the ones who will pay for it. The employees of that company will be using your product but the management may decide whether to buy from you or not.

By this, you can tailor your approach and communication to effectively address the needs and concerns of those who have the authority to make purchasing decisions.

• Attract Audiences from Competing Businesses

Discovering potential customers who already like your competitors’ products is a smart move. To do this, check out your competitors’ social media pages. Look at their feeds, posts, comments, and followers to find people interested in similar products. Next, try to reach out to those interested people.

Also, take a peek at the content your competitors use to promote their products and how the prospects are responding to it. Understanding what their customers like can help you figure out what features are valued, giving you improvement ideas for your product.

• Provide Solutions, Beyond Mere Products

Remember that the prospective clients are searching for solutions to their problems. Approaching them with a focus on providing solutions beyond mere products is a strategic and customer-centric approach. Research your potential clients thoroughly to understand their business, industry, challenges, and goals. Identify specific pain points and challenges they may be facing that your products or services can address. Based on this info tailor your communication to address the specific needs of each potential client.

How to Convert Your Prospect Customers into Clients?

Nobody enjoys losing, especially when your plan to turn potential customers into actual sales doesn’t quite work out. But we all understand that when a strategy falls short, it’s a chance to learn, adjust, and improve.

It may sound easy, but we all know it’s harder in practice. So, here are some of the smart strategies for you to convert the prospects into real customers.

1. Embrace Omni-Channel Communication

The sales process works in a specific sequence that is: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.

However, this doesn’t always happen in a fixed order. Customers might skip steps, check out other brands, change their minds, or visit a website through various channels. That’s why it’s important to connect all communication channels in one system.

Omnichannel is a way to bring together different ways of talking to customers into a single system. Here customers can connect with your brand on different channels like website and social media platforms. You can also maintain consistent messaging across all those channels and manage everything from a single place. It’s all about keeping things smooth and consistent for a better experience.

2. Create a Friendly First Message

Try to be personal in your communication while engaging with your prospective customers. A simple generic pitch is not going to work here. Regardless of how you contact them be it through phone calls, emails, or live chat, the message has to be personalized for every customer.

 Here are some tips for you!

• Listen more and speak less.
• Hear patiently what exactly the problem is and share your solution after that.
• Don’t sound robotic, be kind, friendly, and understanding.
• Help them to deal with their problems, don’t force to buy your products. 

3. Opt for Automated Communication

People crave immediate help! Often, when they visit a website, browse products, and show interest, they want quick information. To meet this need, offering chatbot and live chat support emerges as two excellent options. However, your customer support team might be occupied with complex tasks at times. This is where automated communication through chatbot becomes handy, automating various business operations, including customer support that too 24/7. 

Modern AI chatbots can handle a multitude of business functions. For instance, they can assist in booking flight tickets online by accepting your request, displaying available flights, processing your payment, and ultimately confirming the booking. Chatbots also retain previous interactions, generate performance reports, and offer many other functionalities.

4. Demonstrate How Your Product Functions

When we’re interested in a product, we want to see how it functions before deciding to buy. Share all the cool things your product can do, like its smart features, pros, and opportunities. You can do this by creating a guide with text or video, making a presentation, user manual, or through one-to-one conversation.

The smartest choice is to give them a free trial. This lets them see if your product is what they’re looking for, and it also gives you a reason to talk to them again after the trial is over.

5. Share Real Stories and Examples to Build Trust

Nearly 88% of people trust reviews from other users almost as much as they trust recommendations from friends. When you combine storytelling with social proof, it becomes even better. Most of us when buying something online, tend to check customer reviews and testimonials to know what others are saying about that specific product. We also check customer ratings.

Showing authentic experiences and success stories can help build trust and credibility, making your prospects more likely to make a purchase.

6. Request Recommendations

How to get referrals? It’s simple! After someone becomes your customer, just ask if they know others who might like what you offer. If they’re not sure or hesitate, wait until they’ve enjoyed your product or service. Once you know they’re happy, ask again. And to make it even better, you can reward them, like a discount, for referring others to you.

 Pro Tips:

• Always reward successful referrals.
• Tailor your referral requests based on your relationship with each customer.
• Once a customer gives you a referral, don’t forget to update him about the progress.
• Show appreciation for their referrals, whether you have got new customers or not.
• Simplify the referral process for your customers.
• Don’t rely on just one method to ask for referrals. Utilize email, social media, or even in-person conversations to maximize your chances.

Attracting the Prospective Customers: Best Real-Life Examples

Now, let’s explore examples of what a potential customer might look like in various industries.

eCommerce

Here, a prospective client is someone who has browsed the online store, liked some of the products, and added those to his cart but has not completed the payment yet. He may wishlist some products or sign up for regular updates as well.

How to approach him?

• Through a proactive chatbot, you can get in touch with him and ask if he needs some help to complete the purchase.
• Through email and push notifications or SMS you can remind him about his abandoned cart.
• You can offer him some small discounts.

Real Estate

In real estate, a prospective customer is someone who asked about a house or apartment for sale or rent, visited some of the sites, or browsed a real estate website to get regular alerts about available properties. Essentially, it’s anyone who is looking into the possibility of becoming a new homeowner or tenant.

How to approach them?

• First, personally get in touch with him through live chat, email, or phone call and fix up a one-on-one meeting.
• AI chatbot for real estate is also a good option for proactive assistance. 
• Listen carefully to his requirements.
• Ask questions about his preferences, idea property, and budget.
• Demonstrate your knowledge of the local real estate market, trends, and neighborhoods.
• Share insights about property values, potential investment opportunities, and any upcoming developments in the area.
• Share testimonials, case studies, and success stories about your real estate company to build trust.
• Educate your potential customers about the real estate process, from property searches and negotiations to closing the deal.
• Offer informative resources, such as market reports, guides, or blog posts, to help them make informed decisions.
• Tailor your communication style and content to match the preferences of each client.

B2B Business

Here the prospective customer will be a company that gets in touch with a service provider to know more about its services, benefits, and pricing but has not signed the contract yet. Acquiring and maintaining business-to-business (B2B) customers involves a distinct set of strategies compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions. 

The service provider companies need to check all their competitors and understand what extra they are offering to stay ahead in the long run. As the competition is huge here, you have to offer something extra to attract new customers and retain them.

Pro Tips:

• Before approaching a prospective B2B customer, thoroughly research and understand their specific business needs and challenges.
• Tailor your communication to highlight how your solution can address their unique pain points and contribute to their business goals.
• Engage in networking events, industry conferences, and other platforms where you can connect with decision-makers and influencers within target organizations.
• Offer customized solutions that align with the unique requirements of each business prospect.
• Showcase how your product or service can provide value, enhance efficiency, or solve specific problems within their operations.

Travel and Tourism

Prospect is an individual or a group of people who want to book flights, accommodation tour packages, or other travel-related services. They visit different websites that offer travel-related services, ask for quotes, or try to book flight or train tickets. Identifying and understanding these potential customers is crucial for travel businesses to tailor their offerings and marketing strategies effectively. 

How to approach such clients?

• Reach them proactively on the website itself through live chat or chatbot to offer instant assistance.
• You can also help them book flights through screen share or over phone calls.
• Talk to them to understand their preferences and offer customized travel packages.
• Ensure that your communication is clear, transparent, and responsive.
• Send newsletters, updates, and exclusive offers to keep your audience engaged.

How REVE Chat Can Help You Out?

REVE Chat serves as a comprehensive omnichannel customer engagement platform, enabling instant assistance on various platforms such as websites, mobile apps, and popular social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp.

Seeking to connect with potential customers on their preferred channels? REVE Chat is the solution you need. It facilitates consistent messaging across all platforms while allowing you to manage interactions seamlessly from a centralized location.

Consider an eCommerce scenario: With REVE Chat, you can monitor real-time website visitors and proactively engage with them, offering instant assistance and even preventing potential exits from your site.

Moreover, REVE Chat features an advanced AI chatbot designed to automate customer support and other business operations. This AI chatbot can efficiently handle multiple customer inquiries simultaneously, assisting 24/7, even during peak times when support agents are occupied with complex tasks.

Experience it firsthand with REVE Chat’s 14-day FREE TRIAL, allowing you to explore and test all its distinctive features. Don’t miss out – SIGN UP today!

In 2007, Joseph Jaffe introduced the concept of conversational marketing. His goal was to show business folks how to talk with their audience using different platforms.

Conversational marketing is just like having a knowledgeable salesperson in a brick-and-mortar store who guides you through the product options, addresses your concerns, and helps you make an informed decision.

Conversational marketing uses smart tools like chatbots and live chat to quickly give info, answer questions, and suggest things based on what customers want, making interactions smooth and personalized. Plus, they make the conversation feel personal and natural, like talking to a real person.

In this blog post, we will explore more about conversational marketing, its advantages, and a curated list of top-tier conversational tools so that you can choose the best ones for your business. So, keep reading!

What is Conversational Marketing?

In simple terms, conversational marketing is when you talk to your customers to understand their needs during their journey. It’s a way of marketing that involves real-time conversations to engage visitors on your website, mobile apps, and other social media platforms and guide them through the buying process. Instead of just showing information, it’s more of having a chat with your customers, finding out what they need, and offering solutions. 

Conversational marketing not only helps customers feel at ease during the buying process but also plays a role in forming customer relationships. When a relationship is established, a potential customer is more likely to keep moving forward on their journey as a customer.

5 Main Types of Conversational Marketing Platforms

Next, let’s explore the 5 main types of conversational marketing platforms that are reshaping how businesses connect and build relationships with their audience.

1. Live Chat

Live chat platforms have become crucial tools for businesses aiming to provide excellent customer service and build strong connections with their audience. With user-friendly interfaces and practical features, these platforms allow businesses to engage in real-time conversations using live chat software. Live chat tools not only help to offer excellent customer service but also enable the transmission of marketing and sales messages during live chat interactions.

Integrating live chat as a part of your website or online store is essential nowadays. You can customize its appearance to match your brand and configure messages accordingly. Despite its primary association with customer service, live chat also plays a significant role in marketing. 

2. Chatbot

Chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence, mimic human conversation to swiftly and accurately respond to customer questions. They serve various purposes, such as addressing FAQs and guiding customers through the buying process. If you have an online store and want to offer real-time assistance to your customers 24/7 then chatbots are the best options to opt for. 

AI chatbots have become integral to conversational marketing by enabling businesses to establish instant connections, provide personalized experiences, qualify leads, and automate various aspects of customer engagement. As technology continues to advance, chatbots will likely play an increasingly central role in shaping the future of marketing interactions.

3. Email

When we talk about conversational marketing, emails may not come to mind as much. That’s because they’re not entirely chatty; they are more of a formal marketing method. However, they still play a role in connecting with your audience and building a relationship with them.

4. Voice Assistants

Businesses can establish a distinct brand voice and personality through voice assistants. The tone, style, and language used in interactions contribute to building a consistent brand identity and fostering a connection with the audience. 

Voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri provide immediate responses, enhancing the speed of customer interactions. This instant feedback contributes to a seamless and engaging experience, capturing the user’s attention at the moment of interest. As technology continues to advance, the role of voice assistants in shaping the future of marketing interactions is likely to grow.

4. Social Media

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Viber, Instagram, and Twitter, play a crucial role in any strategy aimed at connecting with your audience. They offer a space for interaction, content sharing, and receiving feedback. Tools like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct enable direct and personalized communication with your customers.

In 2024, these tools for conversational marketing are all set to advance further, introducing more upgraded features. So, your business needs to stay well-updated and make the most of these tools to enhance the overall customer experience. Next, we’ll explore more about their benefits. 

Benefits of Using Conversational Marketing Tools

The idea of conversational marketing is to talk both ways, like friends, to build trust and make customers want to stick around. Here, we’ll talk about some of the best things about using conversational marketing tools.

• Real-time Assistance

Customers want instant assistance with their problems. When almost half of the customers, around 46%, can’t find basic info like where a company is or its working hours, or they can’t get quick answers, it makes them upset. 

Conversational marketing helps by offering proactive customer support. It lets customers help themselves 24/7 on company websites and through chatbots that work on different platforms. These chatbots only connect customers to real agents when it’s necessary. While support agents can only help a few customers at once, chatbots can assist lots of frustrated users all at the same time. 

• Personalized Engagement

Conversational marketing tools can be programmed to deliver personalized content and recommendations based on user preferences and behaviors. This approach not only enhances the level of customer engagement but also increases the effectiveness of marketing efforts by delivering more relevant and targeted information.

• Improved Customer Experience

These conversational marketing tools let you engage with the customers personally, and quickly help with their queries. For example, chatbots can instantly answer about 80% of common questions. This means your customer service team can spend more time on harder issues.

Also, you can make these tools like voice assistants match your brand’s way of talking. This makes sure that, no matter where customers reach you, they get the same special experience that fits your brand.

The end goal of personalized interactions is to create a tailored customer experience. This means that your users feel that the information, suggestions, and responses they receive are unique to them, fostering a sense of individual attention and relevance.

• Available Round the Clock 

AI chatbots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring continuous customer engagement. This around-the-clock availability is crucial for businesses catering to a global audience with different time zones or for those who want to provide support outside regular business hours.

Having the ability to interact with a business at any time enhances accessibility. Customers can access information, make inquiries, or engage in transactions during non-traditional business hours, accommodating varying schedules and preferences.

• Increased Sales

Conversational marketing tools contribute to increased sales by providing immediate engagement, personalized interactions, and efficient support throughout the customer journey.  For example, live chat and chatbots, enable businesses to engage with website visitors instantly. This immediate interaction allows businesses to capture the attention of potential customers when their interest is high, increasing the likelihood of converting leads into sales.

These tools are also effective in gathering information about potential customers during interactions. This data includes preferences, purchase intent, and specific needs. By qualifying leads in real time, you can prioritize the leads that are more likely to convert, improving the efficiency of the sales process.

• Time and Resource Savings

Automation of routine tasks and interactions saves time and resources. Conversational marketing platforms like chatbots, automate routine and repetitive tasks. This includes handling frequently asked questions, gathering basic customer information, and guiding users through standard processes. By automating these tasks, businesses can free up human resources for more strategic and complex activities.

Top 10 Conversational Marketing Tools

Great conversational marketing platforms offer different tools to help your company talk with customers in real-time, keep track of the conversations, and make customer support better. Check out these best 10 conversational marketing tools that we suggest you keep an eye on in 2024!

1. REVE Chat

REVE Chat is one of the best conversational marketing tools available in the market that helps you interact with your customers in real-time. You can use it on your website, mobile app, or popular platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, and Telegram.

If you have an online business and wish to engage more easily with your customers or offer excellent customer service, opting for REVE Chat will be a smart choice. It’s like making an investment that can improve customer service, bring in more potential customers, and boost sales.

Core Features: 

• Use REVE Chat’s conversational marketing bot that helps your customers 24/7, even when your team is not available. 
• Let your customers start live chat sessions whenever they need immediate help from your support team. It’s a quick and easy way for them to get assistance.
• Your customers can start video calls with your support team right from the chat. It’s like talking face-to-face, but online!
• If you’re helping with technical stuff, online shopping, or showing a product, you can easily see and manage your customer’s screen during a chat. REVE Chat’s screen-sharing feature keeps things smooth and straightforward.
• Stay organized by using the ticketing system. You can track and manage customer queries and chat requests, all in one place.
• Get personalized data and detailed reports about your customers and agents. It helps you understand what’s working well and what can be improved.
• See a full overview of your website’s journey, conversations, and details about all the visitors and customers. It’s like a backstage pass to understand your audience better.

And guess what? You can try all these amazing features for free with REVE Chat’s 14-day trial. So, why wait? SIGN UP today!

2. Intercom

Intercom serves as a conversational marketing platform for communication and customer messaging, assisting businesses in establishing personalized and efficient connections with their customers. It provides a set of tools specifically created to enhance conversations, support, and engagement.

 Core Features:

• Intercom enables companies to send targeted and personalized messages to their customers.
• Offers a live chat feature, allowing businesses to engage with customers in real-time.
• With its AI chatbot, businesses can automate certain tasks and messages.
• Offers a comprehensive view of customer interactions.
• Includes a knowledge base feature, empowering customers to find answers to common questions on their own. 

3. Birdeye

Birdeye is a comprehensive customer experience platform designed to help you manage and enhance your brand’s online image, customer interactions, and overall customer experience. It helps companies keep track of their brand reputation by collecting and managing customer reviews from various platforms. It’s like a reputation superhero, ensuring businesses stay aware of what customers are saying.

Core Features:

• With Birdeye, businesses can gather valuable feedback directly from customers.
• Facilitates communication with customers across different channels.
• Allows businesses to create and send surveys to collect insights about customer experiences.
• Assists in managing their online listings across various platforms.
• Enables companies to engage with customers in real-time through webchat and messaging.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk empowers many businesses to deliver exceptional customer service, automate processes, and build lasting relationships with their customers. It’s a comprehensive solution designed to make customer interactions smooth and enjoyable.

Core Features:

•  Zendesk’s ticketing system organizes customer inquiries and issues into tickets, making it easy for support teams to manage and prioritize tasks.
• provide customer support across various channels.
• You can create a knowledge base with articles and guides to help customers find answers to common questions independently.
• Offers live chat functionality.
• Offers automation and AI to automate repetitive tasks, route tickets to the right teams, and provide quick responses.
• Robust analytics and reporting features to track key performance metrics and make data-driven decisions.

5. Facebook Messenger

The Facebook Messenger chatbot is super handy for customer service. It helps you find great shopping options and excellent customer support. With this Messenger, you can even add a buy button, making it easy for customers to purchase without going to your website. It’s like a quick shop right in the chat!

Core Features:

• Facebook Messenger’s primary feature is sending and receiving text messages, stickers, emojis, and media files like photos and videos.
• Users can make voice and video calls.
• Supports group chats.
• You can send short voice messages.
• Users can share their real-time location with others.
• Allows money transactions within the app.
• Can be integrated with business pages, enabling companies to provide customer support, share updates, and even facilitate purchases through chatbots.

6. Instagram Messenger

Instagram Messenger is a valuable tool that allows businesses to connect, communicate, and engage with their customers in a personalized and convenient way on the Instagram platform. This conversational marketing platform ensures secure and private communication between brands and customers. It’s like having a trusted space where conversations stay confidential.

 Core Features:

• Businesses can use Instagram Messenger for direct communication with customers.
• You can create pre-set responses to common queries.
• Instagram Messenger seamlessly integrates with business profiles.
• Businesses can share detailed product information, images, and even catalogs through Messenger.
• Service-oriented businesses can use Messenger for appointment scheduling.
• Instagram Messenger can be used to send order updates, shipping information, and tracking details directly to customers.

7. Respond.io

Respond.io is a complete conversational marketing software that simplifies how businesses, no matter their size, handle customer communication. It brings together messaging from various channels like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, website, and more into one convenient platform. It’s like having all your conversations in a single, easy-to-manage space!

Core Features:

• Respond.io brings together customer messages from various channels.
• Facilitates real-time conversations with customers.
• Provides automation features to streamline repetitive tasks
• Integrates with various third-party tools and applications
• Facilitates collaboration among team members, ensuring a coordinated effort in managing customer interactions.

8. HubSpot Marketing Hub

It is a comprehensive solution that empowers companies to elevate their marketing strategies, attract customers, and build lasting relationships. HubSpot offers multiple conversational marketing tools including live chat, social media management, SEO, ad tracking, and AI software.

 Core Features:

• You can create and send targeted email campaigns.
• Companies can schedule and publish social media posts, track engagement, and analyze performance.
• It streamlines marketing tasks with automation, helping businesses nurture leads and personalize their customer journeys.
• Provides insights into marketing performance.
• Helps to create and manage content on websites.
• Helps companies to optimize their content for search engines, improving online. visibility.

9. Drift

In today’s digital age, tools like Drift are changing the way businesses communicate with customers. Known as Conversation Cloud, it uses smart AI to enhance customer interactions across different platforms such as chat, email, and video. From capturing leads to nurturing them through personalized conversations, Drift empowers brands to create a seamless and engaging experience for their online audience.

Core Features:

• Facilitates instant communication with website visitors
• Drift’s chatbots can intelligently respond to user queries, qualify leads, and guide prospects through the sales funnel with personalized interactions.
• Seamlessly integrates with various communication channels, including email and social media
• Ensures compatibility and functionality on mobile devices
• Offers insights into user behavior, engagement metrics, and the effectiveness of conversational marketing efforts.

10. MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey stands as a dynamic tool for businesses looking to enhance their conversational marketing efforts. It is a versatile chatbot and messaging platform designed to revolutionize how you can engage with your audience. 

With a primary focus on Facebook Messenger, MobileMonkey empowers you to create interactive and personalized conversations, automate customer interactions, and drive meaningful engagement.

Core Features:

• Intuitive interface for designing chatbots without extensive coding knowledge.
• Primarily integrates with Facebook Messenger.
• Chat-based lead generation forms to capture and qualify leads.
• Automation of responses, follow-ups, and marketing sequences.
• AI to enhance chatbot interactions and responses.

How to Choose the Best Conversational Marketing Software?

Picking the correct chat tools can make a big difference for your business. These tools can assist you in talking to your customers, figuring out what they want, and boosting your sales. But, since there are lots of choices, how do you pick the best one for your business? 

Here are a few important steps to help you decide.

Identify Your Needs: Understand what you want from the software. Are you looking to engage with customers, gather information, or boost sales? Knowing your specific needs will narrow down your options.

Evaluate Features: Look at the features each software offers. Consider things like chat capabilities, customization options, analytics, and integration with other tools. Choose a software that aligns with your business goals.

User-Friendly Interface: A user-friendly platform ensures that your team can quickly adapt and utilize the software effectively.

Scalability: Consider the scalability of the software. Ensure it can grow with your business and handle increased demands as your customer base expands. This prevents the need for frequent software changes.

Customer Support: Check the level of customer support provided by the software provider. Reliable customer support ensures that any issues or questions are addressed promptly, minimizing disruptions to your operations.

Integration Options: Choose a software that can seamlessly integrate with your existing tools and systems. This facilitates a smooth workflow and ensures that your conversational marketing efforts are aligned with your overall business strategy.

Budget Considerations: Evaluate the cost of the software and whether it fits within your budget. Consider any additional fees, such as licensing, setup, or ongoing maintenance costs. 

Selecting the Best Conversational Marketing Tools for 2024

In the rapidly evolving online landscape of 2024, businesses must adapt by refining their marketing strategies. The significance of conversational marketing has surged, enabling businesses to engage with customers on a personal, interactive, and impactful level. The dynamics of business operations are transforming with the integration of conversational marketing bots, live chat, video chat, voice assistants, email marketing tools, and social networking tools.

So, to be successful, keep learning and adapting. Stay updated on conversational marketing trends, choose the right tools, and improve your strategies based on customer feedback and behavior.

Think about it: getting a new customer can be five times more expensive than keeping an old one. Just imagine all the time, effort, and resources spent on getting new people to buy from you. That’s why companies are placing a strong emphasis on renewing customer subscriptions. However, when it comes to scaling up, relying solely on renewals is not enough.

That’s where a customer expansion strategy comes in handy. In this article, we’ll talk about why it’s important and discover how it can contribute to achieving consistent, long-term revenue growth, even in the face of uncertain economic conditions.

What is Customer Expansion?

“Customer expansion means making current customers happy and convincing them to buy more. This helps companies keep customers around and saves money compared to getting new customers.”

To expand, companies use strategies like selling more to current customers (upsells), offering related products (cross-sells), and adding extra features (add-ons). This is a smarter way to expand your customer base because it costs less than getting new ones. It’s useful for businesses in every domain, especially in software (like apps), where the focus is on getting more people to use and enjoy the product.

Why Customer Expansion is Important?

Getting new customers is tough in today’s competitive business world. Companies are facing fierce competition and working with limited resources, making it challenging to convince someone to say “yes” to your product without proving its value first.

One way to achieve more lasting growth is by your existing customer base expansion. This approach focuses on showing your current customers the additional value your product or service can provide.

By expanding to current customers, you aim to make them buy more and use your product or service regularly. If you succeed, you’ll keep your existing customers and avoid the costs of trying to attract new ones.

For companies keeping an eye on the churn rate is crucial. If more people are leaving your service than joining, it can lead to problems. The churn rate can be influenced by various factors, such as subscribers not continuing after a free trial or cancelling after a few months.

To boost revenue, focus on providing a smooth customer experience, enhancing satisfaction, and offering extra value. You can capture your users’ interest by upgrading your product, suggesting complementary items, or adding features for subscription-based services.

Now that you have an idea about its importance let’s explore the three types of customer expansion.

3 Main Types of Customer Expansion

There are three primary types of customer expansion:

1. Upgrade or Upselling: Companies persuade customers to purchase a pricier premium version of the product or service they’ve chosen.
2. Cross-selling: It involves a company suggesting additional products that complement the chosen item.
3. Add-ons: Companies provide extra features to enhance the product or service that customers are already using.

To visually see the differences among these three types, here’s one example explained with waffles!

Upgrade or Upselling for Customer Expansion

If people are already using your product, consider offering extras. This way, users can improve their experience by adding extra features through special plans.

Those days are gone when companies used to wait until users ran out of their current plan’s resources before suggesting an upgrade. Things have changed. For example, Dropbox has taken a great approach to offering upgrades to its customers.

Dropbox uses prompts to let users know about the limitations of their free accounts. They offer the chance to upgrade at any time for more storage space. This approach has proven to be effective and beneficial.

Cross-Selling for Customer Expansion

Cross-selling and upselling both want customers to buy more, but they go about it in different ways.

Upselling tries to make customers spend more on what they already use. On the other hand, cross-selling wants customers to pay more for a related product.

For example, if you’re looking for lipstick on MAC’s website, they might suggest buying some mini must-haves as well. This is an example of cross-selling in action, even in the beauty product world.

Add-Ons for Customer Expansion

Add-ons come into play when someone is already using the main product (they can’t be used on their own). You can give users the chance to enhance their product by buying additional services or products.

 Here’s an example from the well-known brand Ferns N Petals, which delivers gifts worldwide for special occasions. They provide add-ons to enhance your gift by offering additional items. For instance, if you order a birthday cake, they suggest extras like candles, flowers, or even balloons to make the celebration extra special. It’s a smart strategy to increase your product range and, as a result, boost sales.

What is a Customer Expansion Strategy?

A Customer expansion strategy, commonly referred to as customer growth or a customer expansion plan, refers to a set of initiatives and tactics aimed at increasing revenue and extracting greater value from existing customers.

Rather than concentrating solely on acquiring new customers, companies adopting a customer expansion strategy strive to optimize the lifetime value of their existing customer base. This approach acknowledges the significance of current customers as valuable assets and aims to strengthen relationships with them.

Top 10 Powerful Customer Expansion Strategies for Business Growth

We talked about the 3 main types of customer expansion. Now, how do you actually do it? Simply offering upgrades or showing extra products on your website isn’t sufficient.

To boost your sales and profits, you must choose effective methods to connect with customers and get them interested. Companies following a strategy to get more customers should pay attention to various factors to make the most of opportunities at the right moment. So, how to use customer expansion to boost sales? We have 10 smart customer expansion strategies for you to think about.

1. Deliver Outstanding Customer Service

Growing your customer base isn’t just about getting new customers; it’s also about keeping the ones you already have with great customer service. Be proactive by helping customers when they visit your website, mobile apps, or social media. Listen to what customers say through feedback and keep making your services better based on their suggestions. 

Focus on solving problems and going above what customers expect; this makes them want to stick with your business. If you consistently give excellent service, not only will you keep your current customers happy, but they’ll also tell others about your business, helping it grow in a steady and positive way.

Wondering how to implement these strategies effectively? Well, there are numerous customer support tools available in the market, and I’d like to suggest considering REVE Chat. It stands out as one of the best AI-enabled customer support software options, allowing you to provide instant assistance across various platforms such as web, apps, Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. With its AI chatbot, your business operations, including customer service, can run smoothly even when your agents are busy or after business hours. 

REVE Chat boasts advanced features like co-browsing, ticketing systems, voice and video chat, analytics, and more, providing your company with a competitive edge. Curious to try it out? SIGN UP today to take advantage of its 14-day FREE TRIAL.

2. Create a Sense of Urgency 

To get people to buy things quickly, marketers use FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) tricks, like setting time limits or bundling products. They use many ways, like ads and messages, to make you want to buy. These tricks make you feel like you might miss out if you don’t buy right away. This helps them sell a lot in a short time. If you can make a good message and offer, your customers might buy something on the spot.

3. Offer Premium Feature Trials 

A good way to get people to upgrade to a better product or service is by giving them a chance to try your premium services for free first. When users try it out, they can see the benefits and value it offers. After the free trial ends, they can decide to buy the better plan to achieve their goals.

4. Keep Customers Informed about New Updates

Let your customers know about any new products or plans you have. Just inform them about your upcoming product launches or upgrades in advance. When they check them out, they might buy or switch to fancier plans with extra features. Reach out to them through social media, emails, web push messages, and chatbots.

5. Utilize Email Campaigns for Upselling

If you’ve got different subscription plans or extras to offer, email can really help you reach more customers.

Most times, businesses send “sales” emails when they’re reaching out to new people or trying to get free users to pay. But guess what? You can also sell more stuff to existing customers through email marketing. First, find out what your customers want before sending emails. Then, let them know about your offers. You can make really good email campaigns and send them to people on your list.

6. Offer Personalized Deals

Using the details you know about your customers—like their preferences or buying history—you can create special offers just for them. This personal touch increases the likelihood that customers will be interested in additional products or upgrades. 

When customers feel that your team is genuinely taking their needs into consideration, they are more likely to opt for these extra offerings. This personalized approach builds a stronger connection between your business and the customers, enhancing the overall satisfaction and likelihood of them choosing additional services or upgrades.

7. The Perfect Time Matters

Selecting the right moment to propose additional services to your customers is very important. Don’t make them feel pushed into upgrading. Instead, wait until they fully understand how valuable your product is. 

Once they recognize its true worth, you can then suggest extra offerings that will enhance their subscription, providing them with even more benefits. This patient and thoughtful approach ensures that customers are more likely to appreciate and accept the additional services you propose.

8. Actively Listen to Customer Feedback

Keep an eye out for chances to expand your business by paying attention to customer feedback. When customers ask questions or share concerns, they usually want a helpful response. 

If you’re careful with every email, phone call, or live chat interaction from customers, you might uncover opportunities to guide them towards better and more advanced features, helping your business grow. It’s all about being attentive and ready to spot these chances when they come up.

9. Tailor the User Interface to Address Customer Challenges

A great time to suggest customers upgrade or add extras is when they’re using your product. Make the screens they see special for them, considering any issues they might be having, and show them a good offer. Also, be sure to really pay attention to what they want, what they like, and their whole experience while setting up the screens they see.

10. Regular Upgrades for Your Offerings

To keep your current customers happy and stick to your brand, always come up with new ideas. Keep an eye on what’s happening in your industry and use new technologies to give solutions that are even better than what your customers expect. To make your product offerings valuable all the time, you have to understand what your customers want, and always find ways to make things better.

Drive Revenue Growth with Customer Expansion

Rather than always trying to get new customers, focus on giving more to the ones you already have. Not only does customer expansion increase your monthly income, but it also makes each customer more valuable over time. Using this approach also helps you handle churn by finding out what might make them go away or what could make them want to stick around for more.