Why SaaS tools are important for end-to-end customer engagement
You know it’s important, and you know you need it. But if you’ve tried your hand at increasing customer engagement, you might feel like you’re spinning your wheels in the sand or maybe wandering without direction.
Or if you’ve just heard the words customer engagement tossed around, you may feel like you’re hearing a foreign language.
No matter what level of understanding you have of the term and how intimidated or overwhelmed you may feel by it, rest assured that it’s not nearly as complicated as it may sound. Customer engagement is easy to understand, and SaaS tools make it an even easier to implement.
Luckily, once you know which tools are the right ones to use, what to use them for, and how to leverage them for engagement purposes, you’ll be able to increase your customer engagement in no time.
Most importantly, if you’re looking for customer engagement, you just can’t do without SaaS.
In this post, not only will we discuss what customer engagement is and why it’s essential, but we’ll also show you how SaaS tools out there can help you step up your customer engagement strategy.
What is customer engagement?
The definition of customer engagement is pretty straightforward: it’s how customers interact with you digitally. For instance, you could have business social media handles, or a website or blog. These platforms offer avenues through which customers can interact with you. They can comment on the posts, share your pages, retweet your tweet or even do something as simple as click a button to like your content.
Even conversing with clients through the use of chatbots is considered engagement.
But what does customer engagement have to do with anything and why is it important?
The significance of customer engagement
Customer engagement is critical because it helps you learn about and interact with your customers in the digital age.
Of course, before the internet when in-person interactions were the norm, client interactions happened in person, face-to-face. You spoke to your customers in their physical presence, and it was easier to learn about their personalities, attitudes, and behaviors through body language and tone.
However, with the shift to digital, in-person interactions are rare. But understanding your customers is just as important, if not more than it used to be. Customer engagement, therefore, is what we use to read customers’ behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and impressions in this new digital era. In a nutshell, customer engagement is what helps you get inside your customers’ heads in the digital world.
Also, customer engagement is proven to be significant from a profitability standpoint. According to statistics, up to 2/3 of a brand’s profits may rely on effective customer engagement.
Now that we know what customer engagement is and why it’s important, let’s tackle the next important topic: how to track customer engagement to make the most of your business. Fortunately, some proven, well-tested SaaS tools make tracking engagement super easy.
What are SaaS tools?
Before we talk about what SaaS tools are, you should first know what SaaS is. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is just software that a third-party hosts and makes available to people. Although it might sound extremely techy and complicated, SaaS is something you are likely to use almost every single day without even realizing.
For instance, if you ever stream movies from Netflix or your favorite songs from an app, you’re using SaaS.
SaaS can also be beneficial in the workplace. Like when customer agents are prompted to provide speedy responses to customer inquiries (particularly crucial since an astonishing 82% of customers expect an immediate response to sales or marketing questions).
Luckily, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools make this and so much more of the seemingly impossible feats possible when it comes to customer engagement and support.
And its many attributes have helped SaaS become increasingly appealing for many reasons: its accessibility (since information is stored in a cloud), flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and automatic updates.
This heightened popularity has given rise to many SaaS tools, which can boost your user engagement and kick it up a notch. Let’s discuss some of the most popular ones and how they can benefit your customer engagement efforts from end-to-end.
Google Analytics
You’re probably not new to Google Analytics. Or if you are, it’s likely you’ve at least heard of this ridiculously popular tool. Used by practically everyone who is serious about site performance and customer engagement, Google Analytics can be a powerful tool in your customer engagement arsenal.
Google has made a name for itself as a dominant search engine. For example, of 3.17 billion internet users in the world, 1.17 billion use Google Search.
In its expertise of understanding web visitors, implementing search algorithms, and unveiling what makes a website truly perform well, Google has successfully devised some of the most powerful SaaS tools out there.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for measuring traffic metrics for your website, analyzing its performance, and delivering custom insights. Even better, Google Analytics delves deep into traffic metrics to categorize visitors by location and traffic type so you can truly get to know your visitors.
Using this insight you can tailor content to suit your audience.
BuzzSumo
Always brainstorming to come up with content ideas suitable for your audience can get pretty tiring. You have social media sites, blogs, podcasts, videos, and more to consider. And getting to all these places to find out what the current buzz is can be challenging, if not impossible.
That’s where BuzzSumo comes to the rescue. As its name suggests, this tool keeps you in the loop about the most current buzz. Plus, it does all the heavy lifting for you, uncovering what topics people are talking about most and where.
Choose to sift through the internet by topic or even focus on learning the information contained in a specific domain to see which subjects are hot and most shared across the web.
To take it even further, BuzzSumo also gives you updates on content being shared on various social media channels and searches backlinks on these platforms.
With the burden of manual, tedious research off your shoulders, you can focus on content development for practically any platform or channel on the web. The cherry on top? You’ll go into it knowing that the content is, indeed, of interest to your audience.
Optimizely
When you’re trying to optimize your site for customer engagement, you’ll want to focus on more than just content. For instance, you’ll want to dig deeper into buttons, copy, layout, and more. To experiment on your own and figure out what’s working and what’s not will require a lot of research, tweaking, and manual data collection.
Fortunately, a tool called Optimizely takes the entire stress out of the research and testing process. Optimizely assists with A/B testing of various elements on your site from copy to buttons.
Best of all Optimizely takes it further than that and analyzes the results of your A/B testing for you so you know what seems to be working best with customers.
Ultimately, with the right mix of changes, you can increase your conversion rates (also a form of customer engagement) throughout your website.
HootSuite
When you’re on the verge of jumping on to the social media bandwagon, it can be tempting to take on all the social platforms. After all, the more platforms you’re on, the better you can interact with larger audiences, right?
But the problem usually comes in when you have to keep up with all the engagement on your feeds. HootSuite alleviates the pain by consolidating them all.
Everything from YouTube to Google+ can be managed through Hootsuite. And you can easily perform tasks like scheduling posts on your social media accounts ahead of time and even interacting with your following on social networks directly from the app. This saves you time as you no longer have to log in to each of your accounts and keep track of comments and feedback.
Best of all, HootSuite is a completely free SaaS tool.
Qualaroo
Of all the customer engagement resources out there and available to you, nothing beats realtime feedback from the people who matter the most: your customers.
Luckily, Qualaroo makes it super simple to collect this coveted feedback directly from the horse’s mouth.
A survey tool that offers appealing forms and unique customization options, Qualaroo is unique. You can use it to perform surveys targeted to exactly the right audience. And you can even choose to enhance your surveys by using Qualaroo’s “Skip Logic” feature, which lets you ask a follow-up question based on the survey-takers prior response. This lets you dig deeper into the survey-taker’s psyche and reasoning and gain deeper insights into your audience base.
Once your surveys are complete, you can then analyze your findings. In fact, Qualaroo helps you in this aspect too through its partnership with IBM, which helps make sense of the survey results.
Conclusion
SaaS. Customer engagement. Conversions. If these words aren’t part of your daily lingo, it can all sound pretty technical and really intimidating. Fortunately, understanding SaaS and how it works in your favor toward customer engagement is not all that difficult.
Plus, the right tools can make your efforts extra easy.
SaaS is something we use nearly every day, be it while streaming your favorite songs or scrambling to type out a report in Google docs.
But what you’ll realize is that when it comes to customer engagement, SaaS is usually a non-negotiable and one of the easiest ways to achieve your goals. Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, Optimizely, and Qualaroo are all unique tools in their own right to help you do everything from improving copy, testing what’s working and what’s not, to conducting surveys.
By leveraging these tools, you can get data on pretty much any insights you’ll need to enhance your site, pages, and more, so that you can augment your customer engagement.
Last but not least, SaaS tools make the daunting tasks of performing A/B testing, deciding on hot content topics and keeping up with social media accounts all a cinch, saving you time, effort, and anxiety.
