“Build it, and they will come” only works in the movies. Social Media is a “build it, nurture it, engage them and they may come and stay.” –Seth Godin
Seth Godin really said it best when speaking about social media, and truthfully, that wisdom applies to way more than just social. Your entire digital marketing strategy won’t work if there is no engagement element. Build a great website and no one sees it, who cares? Write a great blog post that no one reads, what was the point? Sell a great product that no one knows about, what does that leave you with? You get the picture.
Customer engagement is crucial, but it is not easy or quick to obtain. You cannot expect to start up your Instagram page and have 10,000 authentic followers overnight. Instead, what you need to do is plan a complete digital marketing strategy that includes within it a solid content engagement strategy. Thankfully, that is not something you have to handle all on your own.
There are plenty of SaaS tools that can help you improve your content engagement efforts just about everywhere- from social media, to live chat, video marketing, FAQs, retargeting, and more.
Here are 10 of the best SaaS tools to boost customer engagement that you can get started with.
Table of Contents
- Sprout Social: Social Media
- Optimizely: A/B Testing
- Typeform: Surveys
- ProProfs Chat: Live Chat
- Shakr: Video Marketing
- AdEspresso: Social Ads
- Thankbot: Customer Appreciation
- Gamiphy: Gamification
- Airim: Search
- Aimtell: Retargeting
Social media is a great place to start off with when discussing customer engagement. It has tons of potential for building up an audience of engaged customers. A great tool to help you with that is Sprout Social.
Not only can Sprout Social help with scheduling your social media messages across different platforms (they integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest), it helps with social monitoring. Use their platform to respond to user comments, find user-generated content, and even to set up automated responses.
This is one of the most complete social media tools out there, making it a great option for any brand that wants to really nail their social media marketing. Remember, social media should be social. Keep on top of conversations that people are having about your brand, and join in as well! Sprout Social makes it easy to stay connected.
Price: Plans start at $99/month and include a 30 day free trial.
Take the guesswork out of what your customers actually like by performing various A/B tests. While you probably associate A/B testing with improving conversion rates, you can also use this tactic to help improve your customer engagement specifically. Simply put, customers will engage more with things that they like. You can begin to figure out what that is exactly by performing various A/B tests.
A tool like Optimizely will help you set up, run, and analyze A/B tests at your website. Are your blog posts not getting a lot of engagement? Consider an A/B test of various headlines to see what performs better. Or, run a test on various visual elements to see what engages your readers more. You have plenty of options for A/B testing for customer engagement, and Optimizely makes it easy to do so.
Their easy visual editor ensures that anyone can use their A/B testing (no coding knowledge required). We also really like their ‘exclusion groups’ feature that will allow you to run several tests on one page. Instead of looking to industry stats to guess what will work or not work, run your own tests and figure out what works for your audience specifically.
Price: Choose between three different service levels. Contact Optimizely for pricing.
Another great way to boost customer engagement? Ask your customers about their experience with your brand. Go right to the source and figure out what is working and what isn’t! Customer feedback is some of the best data you can collect and use to improve your overall user experience and customer engagement.
Typeform has become one of the best survey platforms, as it allows you to easily create really engaging, modern looking surveys that your customers will actually want to take. If your customer surveys have low engagement rates (how ironic) consider a platform like Typeform to help you out. First you can boost your survey engagement, and from there, use that data to improve your overall customer engagement.
Typeform surveys are easy to create, mobile responsive, and provide you with easy to interpret data based on your results. Brands of all sizes and from all industries should always be asking their audience for feedback. Typeform makes it easy for you to do so. Just make sure you listen to what your audience has to say!
Price: There is a free plan, or upgrade to a higher plan starting at $30/month.
To know what’s on your customers’ minds, it is important for your business to work on strategies that boost engagement. And one strategy that is sure to help you connect and engage with your prospective customers in real-time is live chat. Live chat can help your business understand what your prospects are looking for and enable you to intercept in strategic moments to connect and engage to know what they’re aren’t able to find.
With a live chat tool like ProProfs Chat, you can monitor your website visitors and initiate a proactive conversation with them using chat greetings. These chat triggers will prompt your website visitors to connect faster with your brand and have a conversation where they can resolve their doubts instantly. You can also implement the chatbot feature to collect visitor data faster and assign their chats to the right department or operator to make sure the visitor gets a solution easily.
ProProfs Chat also integrates with social media platforms like Facebook or with other customer support tools so that you will never miss out on an engagement opportunity.
Price: There is a free plan, or you can upgrade to paid plans that start at $10/user/month.
5. Video Marketing: Shakr
Some of the most engaging pieces of content out there today are videos. Unfortunately, video content is also some of the most difficult content to produce. If you don’t have an in-house team of video creators, you may feel like you’ll have to miss out on this excellent customer engagement opportunity, but that is not the case!
Shakr is a tool that allows anyone to create compelling, engaging video content. Seriously- anyone! Their tool is incredibly easy to use (we’re talking drag and drop easy) and it comes with over 2,000 video designs that you get to choose from. High quality video content can be just a few clicks away!
We also like that Shakr has their own advertising platform built in if you want to not just share your new video content, but promote it as an ad. You can handle all aspects of your video marketing efforts with Shakr, and it is sure to result in a major increase in your customer engagement both on social media and at your website!
Price: Plans start at $49/month.
Social media marketing falls into two categories these days: Organic social media and social advertising. For many brands, social ads have become one of the most popular options for engaging their customers, and it makes sense. After all, where is your audience spending their time? That’s right- social media. Target your users right where they are with the right ads that will engage them and cause them to click!
AdEspresso is a tool developed by Hootsuite, and it makes setting up social ads easier than ever. Manage Facebook, Instagram, and even Google ads right from your AdEspresso dashboard.
While organic social media efforts are still incredibly important (especially when it comes to social monitoring, as mentioned earlier), social ads are becoming more and more of a necessity as organic reach continues to decline. Using a tool like AdEspresso allows you to more easily and quickly handle the majority of your social ads by placing them all under one roof, allowing you to easily create, monitor, and tweak them without having to switch around between platforms.
With AdEspresso you can also set up A/B tests in order to make the right changes in order to successfully engage your audience. You can’t deny the importance of social media, so you might as well utilize a tool like this one in order to optimize your content and ads in order to get the best results!
Price: Plans start at $99/month.
7. Customer Appreciation: Thankbot
Customer appreciation is a sure way to boost your customer engagement. Who doesn’t like feeling appreciated? Thanking your customers isn’t just polite, it can do a lot in terms of securing your customers for life and increasing their engagement with your brand. While you could set up something like a triggered email thanking each customer, Thankbot was created to take your efforts to the next level.
Thankbot allows you to send actual handwritten letters to your customers. Seriously! Each letter is handwritten– not printed with a handwritten font. Imagine taking that effort on yourself- who has the time for that? You probably don’t- but the team at Thankbot does. This is a great way to add a truly personal touch to your brand identity, something that ecommerce brands in particular can struggle to achieve.
While traditional mailboxes used to flood with messages, it is now the email inbox that fills up each day. Imagine how surprised your customers will be when they get an actual handwritten letter in the mail thanking them for their purchase! This is a great, unexpected way to wow your customers. Plus, as an added bonus, customers may choose to share your letter on social media, giving you some valuable social proof.
Price: Price is a result of the number of notes you purchase. Purchase 5 notes for $30, or spend less per note if you purchase more at one time.
8. Gamification: Gamiphy
We recently discussed the power of gamification for boosting customer engagement. It is a great way to get people involved with your brand- but it’s not exactly easy to start using. Thankfully, you can rely on a tool like Gamiphy to take care of this for you.
Gamification is all about using the elements of game play and applying it to various tasks in order to make them more appealing and engaging. Signing up for your newsletter may not seem overly appealing, but if a user can do it and earn 10 points which will get them closer to a reward, they will be more likely to do it! Sharing your brand on social media? Reward your users 50 points for following you on Instagram (for example) and an additional 100 points for tagging you in a post!
Gamiphy offers several gamification options, ensuring you get the right system set up for your individual marketing goals. Set up actual games for users to play, create quizzes for them to complete, give them badges based on milestones they pass, and a lot more.
Gamification is one of the latest and greatest tactics for boosting customer engagement. Turn ordinary tasks into fun opportunities that result in a reward- it’s a winning strategy!
Price: There is a free plan, or upgrade to a higher plan starting at $49/month.
9. Search: Airim
Companies that have great customer engagement rates do several things right, and one of those things is providing a great search function that allows their users to easily and quickly find the information they are searching for.
Airim is a great tool you can use that harnesses the power of AI in order to vastly improve the search function at your website. As a user types they will instantly start seeing relevant info. There is also a search suggestion box that will populate with suggestions that are smartly curated based on things like the user’s behavior, device type, and more.
If you are a SaaS company yourself or sell detailed products or services, Airim is a great tool to consider that will help boost your customer engagement. The goal should always be to provide an excellent user experience for your customers, and connecting them with the info they need quickly and painlessly is one great way to do just that.
Price: Plans start at $49/month and include a 15 day free trial.
10. Retargeting: Aimtell
Finally, you can boost your customer engagement by retargeting your audience via web push notification. Don’t wait for them to come back to your website on their own, retarget them via web push! If you are an ecommerce brand, retarget users based on items they have looked at at your website. For content brands, alert users when new content is available that is related to other articles they have read in the past. SaaS company? Alert users of new exciting features or updates. And the list goes on!
No matter what industry you are in, you can benefit from web push. You can install Aimtell at any website with a few lines of JavaScript, or by installing our WordPress or Shopify plugin. With powerful segmentation, personalization, automation, action buttons, and more, you have a lot of opportunities to engage your audience with great campaigns.
Web push is an excellent way to engage your audience without fear of your message getting lost in a crowded email inbox or being scrolled past on social media. Speak directly to each subscriber of yours and call them back to your website. No matter if they are on a desktop or mobile device, you can reach them via web push!
Price: Plans start at $29/month and include a 14 day free trial.
Wrapping Up
Building up a solid customer base that is engaged with your brand is certainly easier said than done, but that is no excuse to sit back and not try. Thankfully, there are plenty of SaaS tools to boost customer engagement, ensuring you will still have plenty of time to focus on other important areas of your business.
These tools cover a variety of digital marketing strategies- including social media marketing, live chat, video marketing, retargeting, social ads, customer feedback, and more. The more ground you can cover, the more success you are sure to experience.
What is your favorite customer engagement tactic, and what tools do you use to help make it happen? Let us know by sending us a message!
Is web push one of the tools you are looking to get started with? Get started for free with Aimtell, or learn more about web push by reading our Beginner’s Guide.
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