Social networks have become an important part of the internet and online marketing landscape in the last decade. How do social networks impact Email Marketing, and is Email Marketing still relevant in a world full of social networks? We explain why email marketing is more important than ever in a socially-networked landscape.

MySpace. Facebook. Twitter. Google Plus. There are an increasing number of social networks that, at one time or another, dominated internet traffic. Of course, marketing via social networks has increased too, which is an obvious necessity since so many consumers and customers spend so much time on social networking sites. Does it make sense for you to allocate all of your marketing resources to marketing through social networking? No! Email is still a very important part of any complete web marketing strategy. Of course, in the socially-networked world, you’ll need to combine your email marketing strategy and your social networking strategy to meet different goals. Here are some tips and advice on how and why to incorporate email marketing with your social media strategy.

Email Marketing Still Provides the Highest Return on Investment

The reality is that everybody from comScore to Marketing Vox have run studies and surveys of top marketers and one statistic remains true – no matter how big the social networks have gotten, email marketing still returns the greatest return on investment. This makes sense when you think about how little overhead or time it can take to send an extremely targeted email to a very specific group of customers or users. If for no other reason than because you are a smart business person who appreciates the  importance of a strong ROI number, email marketing should be at the top of your list of important direct sales and marketing communications channels.

Consumers and Users Do Not Switch Email Addresses – But They Do Migrate Social Networks

Do you remember MySpace? What? You don’t? But that was just a handful of years ago when MySpace was the most popular destination on the internet (other than Google) and everybody had a MySpace profile and spent hours every day on the dominant social networking site. Then, of course, Facebook arrived and became wildly more popular. At the time of this writing, it seems unthinkable that anything would take over Facebook’s position, but it’s entirely possible that, by the time that you read this, Google Plus will be the social network that everybody spends all of their time on. If there is one thing that seems to be true of social networks, it is that users will eventually migrate to another social network.

That, however, is not true of email addresses. Certainly, sometimes people change their email address. But more frequently they simply add a secondary email address and use their older email address less often or for different purposes. The reason that Hotmail remains the largest web-based email service in the world is because it is the oldest, and, even if they don’t check it daily, most people still check their old Hotmail address at least periodically.

An email address isn’t as permanent as a postal address, but once you have a customer’s email address, you have a fairly assured way of getting a message in front of that customer. Changing email addresses is cumbersome. You need to notify all of the people whom you email with regularly and you lose what is often an emotional email history. Unlike social networks, which have so far proven to be transient at best, an email address is an almost assured way to be able to reach most customers or users eventually if not immediately.

Messages Do Not Disappear from Inboxes

Once you send an email marketing message to a consumer, customer or user, that message remains in that individual’s email inbox until the individual either reads it or actively chooses to delete it. That means that even if the user hasn’t read the email, your subject line is still there in the inbox reminding the user of their relationship with your brand. A message on a social network is not permanent. Once you post a message, you are reliant on your user or consumer being logged into the social network in a time frame that allows them to see the posting. No matter how many times per day your business updates Facebook or Twitter, you may not get the message across to a large group of your desired consumers. However, whether it’s actually read or not, email gets to your user or customer and reminds them of their relationship with you.

Email is Targeted. Social Networking is “One Size Fits All”

The nature of social networking is to protect a certain degree of privacy. Additionally, people do not always provide the most truthful information about themselves on a social network. However, your email database contains information that allows you to segment and target communications based on facts such as purchasing history, gender, age, and even geographic location. The most effective marketing messages are the most targeted marketing messages. Social media and social networks do not allow you to target messages effectively.

Social Media is a Brand Engagement Tool. Not a Direct Sales Tool.

At the heart of the matter, however, is the role of social media in your marketing strategy. Most marketing experts agree on one thing – social media is a branding tool, not a direct sales tool. A great part of the reason that email marketing continues to deliver the highest return on investment of all marketing channels is that how users behave on social networks does not translate into direct sales. Social network users gather information and discuss products, they don’t necessarily buy products. Social media is important for brand engagement. It is not, however, typically a direct sales channel like email marketing is.

Email Marketing and Social Media Need to Work Together

Any good marketing plan is a comprehensive marketing plan. That means that your social media and your email marketing platform should work together. There should be opportunities for users to share email contents via social networks and opportunities for users to join your email list via social networks. One strategy does not mean that the other strategy doesn’t need to exist. However, the existence of social networks certainly does not take away the need for a strong email marketing program and strategy!

 

Read More:

• Last article: The Top 10 Benefits of Email Marketing
• Next up: Email Marketing Case Studies: Improving Revenue with Email

Download FREE eBook: Email Marketing Tips-Email Your Way to Success  

Comm100 has provided customer service solutions completely free for two and a half years. Millions of dollars have been spent in developing and hosting Comm100 products.

In order to provide better products and services for our clients, we have to have a way to sustain our business financially. It is a hard decision to start charging.

If you activated your account before 18:00 PM, Dec. 24, 2011 (PST), we thank you very much for your continued support. All the features and operator seats you got for free will continue to be FREE for you. If you purchase premium features or add additional operator seats, you need to pay.  Special discounts  (20%~35% off) are offered to show our appreciation to your support.

If you activate your account after 18:00 PM, Dec. 24, 2011 (PST), you still have the option to get one operator seat for free.

Log into your account to check out details!

Happy holidays!

Take a moment to think about your customer service staff and how you utilize them in the call center or for email customer service inquiries. Chances are that, within your customer service team, there are staff members who are better at one type of inquiry than at another. You may even have your customer service or sales representatives broken up into teams so that groups of employees can be specialized in one area. However, despite the fact that most customer service or sales departments have either teams or individuals who are specialized, most Live Chat requests are sent to a group pool in the majority of service or sales departments.

Now Comm100 Live Chat Allows You to Have Specialized Live Chat Agents or Teams!

Comm100 Live Chat’s Department option means that you can tailor your live chat request routing in the same way that you would tailor call center or email routing. Whether you divide your service or sales members by individuals or teams, the Department feature allows you to set parameters that send chat requests directly to an individual or a defined department. For example, if you sell jewelry, you may want live chat requests that originate from a page that features engagement rings to go directly to a representative who specializes in wedding jewelry. With the Department feature, you can.

Absolute Control Means to Mixed Customer Messages

You won’t need to worry at all that your messages get inadvertently sent to the wrong person or department. Once your live chat button is encoded to route chat requests to a specific department or individual, the live chat button only appears on the webpage when that operator or department is logged on and active in the system and available to take the chat request. That means that you’ll never have a specialized chat request go to the wrong person or team, resulting in a confusing or muddled message to your customer. However, your customer still has the flexibility to choose a specific department request in the pre-chat window if he or she chooses to do so. This means that if a customer clicks a chat button on a specific page but actually needed help with a more generalized issue, he or she can still send themselves directly to the appropriate department.

The Department feature enables you to control what information and message gets presented to your customer and from what specialist or specialized team. You still allow customers to take advantage of self-guided options for unique service needs, however.

Benefits: To Both Your Customers and Your Company

The more specialized and personalized you can make your service, the better your customers will respond and the more you’ll see improvement in your bottom line numbers. Benefits to your customers include:

• Higher Quality of Information: Put simply, when you provide a user with a specialist in the area that they are inquiring about, the customer receives better service with a higher quality of information.
• Faster Resolutions: When a customer deals with a specialist, that specialist can identify and solve problems faster and more efficiently than a generalist would.

Benefits to your company include:

• Easy Integration of Live Chat Best Practices: In study after study, agent skill set is the defining factor of successful live chat. The Department  feature allows you to put the best agents in the best position to succeed.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction and Word of Mouth: Better, more targeted customer service means more satisfied customers, who then tell others how satisfied they are.
• Reduced Training Time: Instead of having to train your entire customer service or sales staff on every potential issue, you’re freed to train only specific segments and teams on specialized requests.
• Improved ROI: As you improve your Live Chat performance, you’ll ultimately see improved ROI and improved conversions overall.

Example Practices

How you use the Comm100 Live Chat Department feature will, of course, be specific to your industry or company needs. However, some common uses include:

• Route Chats by Product Departments: Such as in the example with the jewelry website above, if you have product or service segments of your business that require a specialist with specific knowledge, routing your chats accordingly can improve overall customer service.
• Route Chats by Customer Activity: If a customer has a question about billing, you don’t want to send them to a customer service team that specializes in returns. The Department feature can reduce the number of times a customer may be transferred between departments.
• Route Chats by Customer Status: 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue. Make sure that your VIP customers are going to your most skilled agents.

The Comm100 Live Chat Department feature can take your live chat organization and structure to new levels of efficiency.

Want to put this great feature to work for you, SIGN UP for Comm100 Live Chat now!

Customer feedback is the corner stone of improving all business practices, and that includes your Live Chat program. Not only does allowing customers to provide feedback on an experience give you valuable information with which you can grow and expand that service, but it also allows your customers to feel empowered and engaged. The Rating feature of Comm100 Live Chat  allows you to easily and quickly install an optional rating system, set to your preferences, at the end of any chat session.

Customizable Features

You have full control of editing how your Rating window appears. You can customize the welcome message, the number of rating options that you provide and choose whether or not to allow visitors to leave optional comments after providing a rating. The language and content of your Rating window is entirely determined by you.

Empowered Customers are Satisfied Customers

If you choose to enable the rating feature for no other reason, remember that empowered customers are always more satisfied customers. Whether your rating data is positive or negative, customers who are invited to and allowed to leave an opinion are more committed customers and leave with a greater feeling of satisfaction. Enabling the Rating feature can improve your customer service simply by improving your customers’ opinions of you.

Collect Valuable Data from Live Chat Ratings

In addition to allowing customers to feel as though their voices are being heard, the Rating feature can provide you with important data to improve not only your live chat but also many overall business practices. Examples include:

• Operator Performance: Not only can you tell which operators may need improvement in managing live chats, but you can also see which operators get consistently high ratings from chats. This not only allows you to reallocate staffing so that the most successful live chat operators take the bulk of or the most important chats, but it also allows you to identify potential trainers or managers for live chat techniques.
• Department Performance: Similar to the data that you can generate in relation to individual   operator performance, the data that you can collect regarding department performance is equally important. Your product specialists may get consistently high ratings, but your billing specialists may get consistently low ratings. By identifying this trend, you will know that your billing specialists require additional training and support on effectively managing live chats.
•  Successful Chat Techniques: In the rating report, you can see ratings next to the transcript of the chat that the rating was from. By studying this data, you’ll be able to identify chat techniques and verbiage that lead to the best comments and ratings. Then you can make those transcript segments into canned Live Chat responses or train your team members to emulate them.

Want to put this great feature to work for you, SIGN UP for Comm100 Live Chat now!

Whether you’re a Live Chat pro or whether you’re just beginning to implement your Live Chat programs, there are some basic best practices that you can use to make sure that you’re using Live Chat (and Intelligent Auto Invitation features) to enhance and  improve your sales and customer service in an optimized way.

Starting from Where Your Customers Abandon Your Website

A great way to begin a live chat program is to review your own website analytics firstly. Whether you use Google Analytics or another enterprise level solution, identify pages on your website that have a high bounce (exit) rate or where you need to improve conversions or sales. Those pages that are under-performing in your metrics reports are a great place to begin live chat to improve website performance.

Use Proactive Chat Instead of Reactive Chat

While any form of live chat technology used on a website will improve overall conversion and customer activity, using proactive live chat rather than reactive live chat can increase ROI to up to 105% according to a Forrester Research study. Reactive live chat is when you rely on interested customers to click your live chat button. Proactive live chat is when you actively extend invitation to users to begin a chat session based on various criteria. Comm100 offers both standard live chat Auto Invitation functionality and improved Intelligent Auto Invitation functionality to create the most customized invitations possible.

Customize Chat Content Based on Unique Criteria

If you are using proactive live chat, then be sure to customize your chat invitations to be specific to the user experience. If you’re using a standard live chat auto invitation feature, then you can set basic parameters such as customizing your chat invitations to reference the product that was featured on the page a user was viewing at the time. If you are using Comm100’s exclusive Intelligent Auto Invitation, then you can refine invitations using multiple criteria such as the user’s state, region and so on. This gives you the ultimate ability to craft a highly customized, high-converting chat invitation for optimal results.

Create Criteria Based on Your Business Sector

While some criteria can be universal, such as inviting a user to a chat session when on a shopping cart page, some may be specific to your industry. For example, let’s say that you run a website that sells automotive parts. If a user is on a page with a car stereo, your invitation message may be specific to that product line. You may want to initiate the Live chat invitation by saying, “Do you have any questions about whether this unit is compatible with your car, or what the technical specs are? We’re here to answer!”

Initiate Chats with New or Unproven Visitors

When selecting which users to proactively initiate chats with, focus on newer customers (often with fewer site visits). New customers are less likely to have a brand relationship with your company yet. Therefore, they are more likely to be responsive to a welcoming and helpful chat invitation.

Always Offer Chat in the Shopping Cart or Sign-Up Page

Your transactional pages, such as a shopping cart or sign-up page, are the most important pages on your website. Always proactively offer a chat option on these pages regardless of customer parameters.

Referral and Current Page URL Invitations are Highly Effective

If you have a website that sells products, your most effective Live chat invitations may be from the product pages themselves. Asking a customer if they have a question about a specific product that they have been viewing for ten seconds or more can often lead to a sale. Personalize each auto invitation to include the name of the product on the page. Referring URL can also create great conversion opportunities. If you know that a user came to you from a link on a site where you advertise a specific promotion, you can ask in the auto invitation if they have any questions about the promotional offer that they saw on the referring website.

Don’t Over Personalize Messages

You want users to feel a personal, welcoming sense from your message. However, you don’t want them to feel as though you’re spying on them! Avoid messages such as “We’ve noticed that you’ve been here many times on this same page. Can we answer a question for you?” Focus on personalizing based on information that wouldn’t make the user feel as though you know too much about them!

Grammar Counts!

In numerous studies, two factors mattered when creating a successful live chat program (including auto invitations). The first is grammar! Be sure to have somebody edit and check your auto invitation text for proper grammar and spelling.

Agent Skills Count!

The second factor that created optimized live chat programs was the skill set of the agent. Intelligent Auto Invitation for Live chat gives you the opportunity to send specific chats to the most qualified agent or group. Make sure to take advantage of that opportunity.

Using live chat as a marketing and customer communications channel isn’t significantly different from using other marketing and communications channels in terms of how you can best optimize it. You want to combine knowledge of your visitors’ behaviors with creating tailored messages that speak directly to them. This could be based on the customer’s demographic data, website location, or even referral data. The more targeted that you make your message, and the better your trained agents are, the better your response rate will be.

Want to create a great live chat program? Sign up today!

Comm100 Live Chat Advanced Feature: Intelligent Auto Invitation

There’s no debating how important a Live Help program, more specifically live chat  could be to the success to your business. It has been shown to be one of the most cost-effective and high-converting methods of utilizing one-on-one interactions with customers to increase revenue. However, unlike push-based communications such as email or phone calls, Live Chat can often risk leaving business on the table. After all, you’re relying on customers to choose to request a chat with one of your sales or customer service operators. That doesn’t have to be the case any longer. Take your Live Chat proactive! Comm100 Live Chat provides Intelligent Auto Invitation as an enhanced feature.

What is Intelligent Auto Invitation?

Intelligent Auto Invitation is a feature that allows you to initiate live chats with your website visitors at points where you may realize that they need assistance or encouragement. Imagine the following scenario. You run a pet care company, and you have noticed that in average, 5% of your users who stay on your “Pets Training Program” sign-up form for longer than ten seconds abandon the page without completing it. However, for users who came to the page by search keywords “dog training” and also stay on the page for more than ten seconds, the abandonment rate goes up to 10%. What happened to those users? Does your program not suitable for dogs?  What can you do to improve the conversion and sign-up?  With Intelligent Auto Invitation, you can program a live chat invitation to automatically pop-up when a user has been on the page for ten seconds and has come from searching the keywords “dog training”. The invitation will give you a great chance to figure out where the problem is and how to solve it by directly talking to the dog people. And the result will be improved conversions.

What are the Benefits of Intelligent Auto Invitation?

You already know the benefits of using live chat software on your site and basic auto invitation functionality, but improving your live chat engagement metrics with Intelligent Auto Invitation can increase the benefits of your live chat program even further.

• Make Reactive Customer Communications Proactive: Proactively contacting customers will always yield higher results than only communicating with the minority of customers who directly reach out to you.  In fact, according to a  study by Forrester Research, reactive chat showed a return-on-investment (ROI) of 15% while proactive chat showed an ROI of 105%! Intelligent Auto Invitation means that you can customize your proactive chat invitations to turn 105% ROI into an incredible 205%.
• Personalized Communication for Increased Conversions: It’s a business fact that the more personalized and targeted your communication is, the higher the likelihood that it will lead to a conversion. Live chat allows you to talk with customers in a personalized, informal manner while Intelligent Auto Invitation allows you to begin these conversations in a non-invasive, welcoming way.
• No Customer is Left Behind: No matter how specific the requirements are that get a customer into a live chat,Intelligent Auto Invitation can accommodate them. You can create as many invitation parameters as you want to appeal to any type of customer or customer activity. Nothing has to be generic. Everything can be specific and highly effective.
• Improved Bottom Line Numbers: Of course, the most important thing is that proactive live chat, enhanced and optimized by using Intelligent Auto Invitation, improves your bottom line. You’ll see more sign-ups, conversions and sales.

How to Get Started with Intelligent Auto Invitation?

Getting started with Intelligent Auto Invitation is simple. You can literally be up and running within minutes. To help you better understand, let’s take the above pet care company for example.

i. Setting Up Your Intelligent Auto Invitations: To begin a new invitation for your “Pets Training Program”, just click the “Add New Auto Invitation” button, enter a name such as “Dog Sessions Invitation”, enabled it and decide if the invitation can be shown more than once per visit. You can add as many Intelligent Auto Invitations as you need, and you can set a specific set of parameters for each one. 

ii. Selecting Your Intelligent Auto Invitation Criteria: Next you’ll set your auto invitation criteria and here is where Intelligent Auto Invitation differentiates itself from common Auto Invitation options. Again, you can set as many criteria as you like to make your invitation as specific as possible. You can also set broad invitations. In the “Pets Training Program” case, if you want to present the same invitation to every user who visits your program sign- up page, simply set one criteria to begin a proactive live chat discussion when a visitor is on the URL for the sign-up page. However, if you want to refine your messages or invitations, you can. By selecting the URL for the sign-up page, stating that a user must have been on the page for at least ten seconds, adding a criteria for a specific search term “dog training” that the user entered the website from, you can then craft a customized live chat invitation that acknowledges that the user has come from searching the specific keywords and may have problem about using your “Pets Training Program” for their dogs. 

Comm100 Intelligent Auto Invitation offers 12 different individual invitation criteria that can be combined together to form specific, high-converting strategies for maximizing live chat responses. This flexibility takes live chat from simply proactive to actively engaging.

iii. Personalize Your Invitation: Now you’ll simply need to customize and personalize the invitation message. Continue with the example above, you can send the user an invitation like” Hello! Our Pets Training Program includes excellent training sessions for dogs. Would you like me to introduce more details for you?” In this welcoming, highly-customized way, you have great chances to get connected to your users.

What’s more, Comm100 also allows you to launch auto invitation based on different criteria. You can personalize as many auto invitations as you need to refine and optimize your live chat strategy. For example, your “Pets Training Program” has several different training sites for dogs all over the country. When a visitor comes to your website, instead of simply leaving him with all the training session information, you can send him an invitation like “Hello! May I introduce our dog training session in (the city that the visitor came from) for you?

iv. Improve Conversion by Sending a Live Chat to the Right Representative: Intelligent Auto Invitation also allows you to determine if a chat response should go to a specific operator. For example, in your “Pets Training Program”, you may want to send live chat responses about dog inquiries to a different customer service representative than those about cat inquiries. This can ensure that all live chat responses for a specific type of expertise get routed to the representative best suited for them.

That’s it! In 4 easy steps, you can be running a sophisticated live chat Intelligent Auto Invitation program that will immediately improve the results of both your live chat program and your website performance.

Making a successful live chat campaign isn’t different from optimizing any other marketing or sales channel. The more specific and targeted that you can be with your communications, the more you’ll see results and benefits. Comm100 Intelligent Auto Invitation for Live chat gives you the opportunity to create a custom, tailored system for inviting users or customers to chat.

Can’t wait to get this amazing feature? Enable it today!  SIGN UP now to have all the amazing features within minutes.

Some Intelligent Auto Invitation Best Practices to Get You Started

Whether you’re a Live chat pro or whether you’re just beginning to implement your Live chat programs, there are some basic best practices that you can use to make sure that you’re using Intelligent Auto Invitation in an optimized way. Comm100 has developed a comprehensive article on live chat best practices to help you get the best results out of your program. To read it please click here.

About Comm100 Live Chat

Comm100 Live Chat is the enterprise-grade live chat software for website. It is delivered as a SaaS application and hosted by Comm100. Comm100 Live Chat promotes your sales, reduces your operating costs and increases your customer satisfaction. Learn More

Dear Comm100 clients,

The holidays are upon us. We wish you and your family a happy holiday season.

In this happy moment, Comm100 is to release new updates.

During the release process, your connection to Comm100 servers will be temporarily interrupted and your chat button will show offline to visitors. But we will pay every effort to make our services online as soon as possible.

Event
Comm100 is to release new updates.

Start Time
Saturday Dec. 24th, 2011; 18:00 PST / Saturday Dec. 24th, 2011; 21:00 EST

Complete Time
Sunday Dec. 25th, 2011; 00:00 PST / Sunday Dec. 25th, 2011; 03:00 EST

Duration
6 hours

Expected Impact
Your connection to Comm100 servers will be temporarily interrupted during this period of time and your chat button will show offline to visitors. Logging out of your site account with Comm100 during the upgrading period is recommended.

Contact Us
If you encounter any problems or have any suggestions, please email us at support@comm100.com.

Happy holidays!

1. Add the feature to remember the position and size of the Desktop Client Visitor Monitor window
2. Fixed the bug that the Desktop Client Visitor Monitor window sometimes becomes not responding.
3. Fixed the bug that operators will be automatically logged out when Live Chat is running in the lock screen of the Android mobile.
4. Fixed the Input string was not in a correct format error which occurs when operators update Website Integration plan (e.g. Chat Window, Offline Message Window, Language and etc.).
5. Fixed the bug that Auto Login function (in web edition Visitor Monitor) does not work.
6. Fixed the Timeout issue which occurs when operators view the daily report of Visitor & Chat Metrics. 
7. Fixed the bug that operators cannot get sound alert when a chat request is accepted automatically.
8. Fixed the bug that the visitor list (in the Visitor Monitor window) scrolls down automatically.
9. Fixed the bug that sometimes the last line of visitor’s response doesn’t scroll down automatically.
10. Improved the look and layout of the chat transcripts and offline messages which are sent to certain email accounts.
11. Fixed the 404 error which occurs when operators try to manually send 500 items of transcript records at one time to an email account. 
12. Other minor fixes and tweaks.

Thank you all for your continued support!