Every business tries to achieve better customer service, more exposure, and more sales. However, that’s not always possible with manpower alone. Thanks to the rapid development of technology we now have access to cutting-edge data analytics tools for a decent price.
Here are the technologies you can use to make your sales skyrocket.
Social media automation
With almost a third of the globe being on Facebook and over a billion on Instagram, social media is topping the list of marketing channels. However, the amount of work you have to do for a good marketing campaign to be effective is enormous.
You have to come up with and post posts, answer the questions you get in DMs and the comments and manage the paid ad campaign. Considering the fact that you have to do this for multiple social media, it’s a ton of work.
With apps like Hootsuite or Iconosquare, you can do all these tasks on auto mode. You’ll get more time to build your business and the tools to analyze your performance on social media.
You can take social media automation further by getting more data about your audience and using it to personalize messages. Track user actions on your website and set up responses to triggers.
You can create an email template that will be sent as soon as a customer abandons their cart. It can be more intricate like adding the person to a specific mailing list after they’ve shown their interest in a particular product or discount.
Chatbots
Dealing with customer questions can be a nightmare. Instead of doing actual work you answer the same set of questions again and again. Most of them feel like they could be answered by a robot. They can be.
Create a chatbot to answer the most frequent questions, and you’ll kill two birds with one stone. The customers get their questions answered, and you get more time to work on your business.
If you create a Facebook Messenger chatbot, it can double up as live chat on the website.
Source: Facebook
You can create a chatbot on Facebook, but that would require knowledge of the API for more advanced sequences. With platforms like ManyChat or Chatfuel, you can create your custom chatbot in a drag and drop menu.
Source: ManyChat.com
You can also let customers book meetings with a chatbot to save your sales team’s time.
SEO tools
Painting all SEO tools with a broad brush may be too superficial, but despite the variety of functions, all of them serve one purpose. Some tools check your backlinks, some show you your position in SERPs on multiple keywords, some analyze your traffic sources.
Moz’s Keyword Tool, for instance, can show you detailed statistics on keywords as well as keyword suggestions.
Source: MOZ
You can also use analytics tools like Moz, SerpStat or Ahrefs to see your competitors’ link profiles and hijack their link building strategy.
These kinds of tools are extremely beneficial for your business because they let you analyze and improve organic traffic volume.
BrightEdge’s study shows that organic search drives 51% of all traffic. While the number may differ depending on your business, search engine optimization is likely to still be on your list of marketing channels. And good SEO is impossible without tools like Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs.
Each SEO tool is different, but the top performing one combine these functions:
- Keyword checker
- Backlink tool
- Domain Authority analysis
- Traffic analysis
- SERPs rank checker
Apart from these basic functions, you need to make sure that the main driver of traffic, the content, stays readable and engaging. Use content SEO tools like Grammarly, Typely, or Ivory Research to proofread your content and make sure it’s quality is going to help you drive more traffic.
CDN
When it comes to SEO, there’s one thing that no tool can control. It’s the speed of your website. If it’s too slow, people will find your website thanks to your tremendous SEO and promotion efforts, and leave it because it’s too slow.
The basic requirements for a good website speed are image and code compression as well as JS code that doesn’t slow down the website. However, no matter how well-written your website is, it won’t work fast on a slow hosting.
Apart from a decent bandwidth and HTTP/2, there’s another technology that can improve website speed. CDN or a content distributing network is a network of servers placed around the globe that make sure every customer enjoys a fast connection speed (Source).
To implement it on your website, you don’t need coding skills. Most hosting companies will do it for you if you upgrade to a plan with a CDN.
Lead scoring
Increasing traffic is one of the main ways of increasing the number of sales. If 5% of website visitors convert to buyers, you can make more sales is you manage to get more people over. The previous technologies make sure you have plenty of traffic.
The other way of making more sales is by increasing the conversion rate. You can do it by focusing your efforts on the leads that are more likely to convert and nurturing the others. That’s why you should consider implementing a lead scoring system on your website.
If you are going to implement the first point on our list, you need to use customer action tracking on the website. You can use the data you receive to mark users to see how qualified of a lead are they.
In this system, each user action is rewarded by a mark. The more an action is likely to lead to conversion, the more points a user gets. The more points a user has, the more attention they receive from your sales team.
The simplest way of creating a lead scoring system is by using Hubspot CRM. You can assign scores to specific user actions or properties.
Source: Hubspot
To start, you have to compile a full list of possible actions on your website. Give each a weight that corresponds to how likely is this action to lead to conversion. For instance, you can assign 1 point to reading an article, 10 points to signing up to a product-specific webinar, and 15 points to checking the price list.
Once a particular lead has over 50 points total, your sales team can concentrate their efforts on them. Great CMS systems will allow you to automate the process but sending leads a specific email once they hit the mark.
The trouble is in the weights you assign to actions on the website. The only way you can learn whether you’ve made a mistake there is by looking at how does your system performs. Analyze it, and change the weights if you keep marking unqualified leads as qualified.
Here’s a pro tip. If you combine this system with the regular CMS, you can deliver calls right when the lead makes the converting action and talk to them in person.
Big Data analytics
The analysis is key to making any business a success. Start with the low-level analysis of your performance rate, SEO progress, and social media success. You’ll get an insight into what techniques work and what don’t.
If you have the budget, consider investing in AI analytics. You won’t have to train the algorithm yourself, though. Since you probably don’t have any machine learning engineers on staff, you can hire some. Don’t worry, it’s not just for millionaires, if you run an SME, you can probably afford it.
It can cost you anywhere around $7,000 to rent servers, set up a neural network and hire engineers to train it. Using a SaaS AI can cost around $150 a month. This is a fair price since the insight you can get from this investment is priceless.
Training an AI on Amazon Machine Learning or IBM will help you predict trends and create more reliable suggestions to increase upsales.
Social proof notifications
Social proof is based on the idea that people make decisions based on what others in their environment do.
Imagine you’re walking down the street looking for a place to grab some coffee.
ProveSource is one of the leading tools that you can add to your website to start increasing your sales and conversion rates. ProveSource showcases your recent orders, positive reviews, number of visitors and more, to boost the trust of your visitors and make them buy from you or signup for your offer.
Conclusion
Modern technology is so advanced it can be rather cheap. For the relatively low price you pay, you receive a huge edge over the competition. The six technologies covered in the article are the basis that will cover most of your business’ needs.
Invest in them to keep your customer experience, sales, and conversions up to date. Don’t stop there, and discover the software peculiar to your industry to be the best on the market.
