Just like the analogy of a dart board! You must know where to aim before hitting the bullseye. 

In this case, the bullseye is your user’s behavior and you have to track them effectively.

So, before we jump into the strategies and techniques, let’s understand what digital marketing strategy actually is.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

At its core, it’s a plan but a very focused one with a specific marketing goal in mind. Well, it might sound a little intimidating. 

But think of it like your business roadmap! You know where you are, you know where you want to go and the strategy is how to get there.

So your digital marketing strategy will be applying all these strategies to track your internet audience and turn them into your ideal customer.

So without any further ado, let’s discuss the strategies that you track users across the web.

To enhance your client support strategy—download our comprehensive FREE eBook and build a high-performing customer service team.

The form can be filled in the actual website url.

What are the digital marketing strategies that track users across the web?

Tracking is no longer limited to basic demographics (age, gender, location). Instead, the digital marketing strategy that tracks users across the web is remarketing or retargeting with exact search intent or user behaviors.

You need to go way deeper to discover their online habits, interests, and pain points

To begin retargeting your users, you can follow these steps.

1. Create a buyer persona 

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your potential customer. It shows who they are, the problems they’re facing, their frustrations with current products, and most importantly, their desired services.

And it’s not just a random guess but a data-driven investigation to get those audiences. 

You have to collect these data by

• Conducting surveys: Target your current customers or ideal buyers and ask questions. For example, about their pain points, motivations, and buying behaviors with online tools like Fluent Forms.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Identify patterns in their buying cycles, the products or services they purchase, and their interactions with your company by using a CRM tool.
• Running polls: Use social media to create polls based on their choices and follow the decisions, comments, and perspectives.
• Study Competitor Data: Look at your competitors’ content and customer reviews to identify the potential gaps in their offerings.

Once you’ve combined all these data, you’ll start to see a clearer picture of your ideal customer.

Just like in the example below.

Once you have a good understanding of our targeted audience, we can start to build our online presence that will actually appeal to them. 

And this is where our website comes into play.

2. Develop an online presence with a user-friendly website

We don’t want to be a dead-end of our strategy. Our website must be user-friendly, load quickly, be easy to navigate, and look good on any device. 

So, when visitors land on our website, they shouldn’t feel like they’ve stepped into a dusty archive. Instead, it should reflect the values of our business and showcase the brand message clearly. 

Moreover, we also need to guide our visitors towards taking specific actions once they arrive. Strong calls to action (CTAs) buttons can do just that, leading the visitors to their desired outcome. Whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a resource. 

Because a website that’s reliable, safe, and valuable gives them a reason to return and turn them into ideal customers.

So, we’ve built a great website and you already know your potential customers. But do they come to you automatically?

No, that’s not happening. Instead, you have to reach out to them by tracking their user behavior.

3. Cross-device monitoring

When you browse through a laptop, desktop, mobile, or anything, you might notice a pre-saved format based on your browsing history.

This is because your device’s DNS and browsers store cookies (information) while you are browsing. These cookies record your activities, such as products viewed, pages visited, or items added to the cart.

And, interestingly these cookies can be tracked through pixels or other retargeting tools.

Tools that are commonly used to retarget users:

• Google Ads Remarketing
• Facebook and Instagram Ads
• LinkedIn Retargeting
• AdRoll
• Criteo

Therefore, using these tools will allow you to directly target their current interest. So, you can optimize these buying intent and use them to optimize your website or run ads.

Hereby, you are not only reaching the right buyer but also at the right time.

4. Intent-based keyword optimization (SEO)

Think about researching for an investment. You’d probably start with a quick online search, right? That’s why our website needs to be SEO optimized for popular search engines (like Google).

Google dominates the search engine market with 95.32% usage on mobile and 81.95% usage on desktop. (Statista)

To make sure our site appears every time for related keyphrases, we need to know which terms they’re actually using to find products or services like ours.

And, guesswork isn’t enough here. Instead, we need tools and data to uncover the right keywords.

Once we’ve identified them, we strategically sprinkle them across our website contents, like in descriptions, image alt text, headings, SEO meta tags, and more.

It’s all connected and sends signals to search engines that our site is relevant and valuable for those specific terms.

But remember, SEO isn’t a one-time solution. Instead, it’s an ongoing process of analyzing and refining with applicable time and effort.

In the end, it’s worth building a strong online presence and attracting the right visitors.

But what if we need results faster?

5. Targeted Advertising  

If you’re not one to wait around, paid advertising lets you appear straight to your audience. With platforms like Google Ads and social media, we can pay to have our ads displayed in front of the people we want to reach.

However, it’s important to be strategic to make sure we’re getting the most out of our budget. That means using the right keywords, targeting the ideal audience, and crafting compelling ad copy that will get people to click. 

And, we need to be well aware of the psychology of our audience to make them stop scrolling and pay attention.

Maybe you already noticed that things are starting to come together at this point. As we’re exploring a fascinating approach to reach our target audience. 

So far, we’ve optimized our website, we’re using SEO to attract organic traffic, and we’re running paid ads to get in front of the right people.

But how do we keep track of it all? That’s where we move from initial monitoring to ongoing surveillance.

6. Cross-web tracking

This is the final stage of retargeting but also the most crucial one. Or, you must say the core of your user tracking. Cross-web user tracking, a process of gathering data on how users interact with our brand or similar industry.

And, it’s not one or two but an enormous amount of customer interaction data across the web. For example, popular search pages, prolonged session durations, and overlooked sections along every other step of the customer journey.

Much like following their digital footprints. You know it sounds way too similar to the buyer persona. However, this tracking process captures a much larger and more detailed scale of user behavior.

So, how do we gather and make sense of all this data to truly understand user interactions?

Fortunately, there’s a range of tools to help visualize and map out the customer journey:

With the help of these tools, we can gather valuable data on customer behavior. Either they are satisfied with our services or get stuck in certain areas. All these will be stored in our data repository. 

And by closely examining this behavioral data, we can move into the next phase of our digital marketing strategy: implementing personalized customer experiences.

Implementing web user tracking data to improve customer experience

Suppose you were running an ecommerce store and you noticed a high rate of card abandonment. That’s a common problem for online stores. But now as we’re already familiar with the tools and techniques, we can easily figure out the cause of this abandonment.  

For that, we can start to examine the session recording tool to see how users are interacting with your checkout process. Are they 

• confused by a particular form field?
• hesitant to use their credit card information?

It’s like understanding the user’s thought process rather than chasing the problem blindly. And once we start to understand the “why” behind the customer behavior, we can start to implement solutions.

Maybe we need to simplify the checkout process or more payment options or clear information about your shipping cost. So, we are not guessing but using web tracking data to inform our decisions and create personalized experiences.

Not just that. You can also recommend exactly the same products they want based on their past purchases and browsing history.

It’s like having a virtual salesperson that knows exactly what the customers are looking for. And if they abandon their cart, you can also send them a personalized email with discounts or helpful information.

So, it’s all about providing the right information at the right time based on the customer’s needs and preferences. And this can be applied to any industry, not just ecommerce. 

And, the beauty of this digital marketing strategy is the more data you collect the better your personalization efforts become. It’s a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. 

But there’s a question that still arises, is there any risk of being too personalized?

Finding balance in cross-web tracking remarketing strategy

There’s a fine line between being helpful and crossing into creepy strategy. That’s something we always need to keep in mind in digital marketing. Personalization should never feel intrusive or manipulative.

Instead, retargeting is about finding that sweet spot where personalization feels natural and genuinely helpful. Not like we’re stalking every move a user makes. 

Because in online business, transparency is the main key. We need to be upfront with our customers about what data we collect and how we use it.

It’s not just a practice but essential for building trust and loyalty with our customers.

Wrapping up

We’ve come a long way in building a digital marketing strategy that tracks users across the web. Starting from creating a buyer persona and setting up an attractive website to using analytics and techniques to collect user behavioral insights.

From there, we’ve used these insights to create a digital marketing strategy that feels friendly, more personalized, and well-connected. And with that, we’re capping off our deep dive! 

But remember, this is just the beginning of your journey, there’s a whole world of marketing knowledge out there. So, keep learning!

The post What is the Digital Marketing Strategy that Tracks Users Across the Web? appeared first on Fluent Support.

In 2025, staying competitive means making smart choices, such as utilizing specialized plugins that improve your store’s functionality, enhance customer interactions, and streamline operations. If your store is built on WooCommerce, numerous plugins are available to cover every aspect of store management.

From increasing sales with powerful marketing tools to ensuring a smooth checkout, we’ve compiled a list of essential WooCommerce plugins to help take your store to the next level. Whether you’re just starting or looking to expand, these plugins will optimize every facet of your online business.

1. GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin (CCPA Ready)

The WebToffee GDPR WordPress Cookie Consent plugin helps you add a cookie banner to your website to comply with major privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA for using cookies. It provides an easy way to receive consent from website visitors about using cookies to keep your site compliant with privacy laws.

This plugin offers an easy, complete solution for handling consents by automatically scanning your website and blocking third-party cookies until consent is given. It further allows you to obtain both explicit and implicit consent according to relevant legal requirements while offering flexibility in how consent is being applied.

Beyond that, the plugin enables visitors to choose certain categories of cookies to which they wish to consent and be informed of various cookies sent to their locations within the cookie banner. The WebToffee GDPR plugin also supports advanced tools for integration with Google Consent Mode v2 and IAB TCF v2.2, thus providing an exceptionally strong option for privacy compliance on your WordPress site.

2. Security for WooCommerce  

Security for WooCommerce is one of the must-have plugins for safeguarding your online store from fraudulent transactions. As identity theft and location-based fraud continue to increase, online stores should adhere to strict security measures to combat such threats, and this plugin is the right tool for the trade.

This plugin identifies and blocks these suspicious incidents. It has features like location-based sales restrictions and IP address management, allowing the merchant to limit transactions to specific regions or block suspicious activities. This ensures that all transactions are legitimate and on target in the store, ensuring a safe and secure shopping environment for the business and its customers.

3. PushEngage

PushEngage is a marketing plugin that simplifies the running of an eCommerce campaign much easier through personalized push notifications. Integrating this plugin can help convert visitors to loyal and repeat customers by automatically sending push notifications such as welcome messages and special offers.

The plugin also comes with in-built triggers, like cart abandonment reminders and price drop alerts, so that in-time prompts reach customers at the right time to make them buy. Built-in revenue tracking allows you to evaluate the success of your campaigns and gives informed, data-driven guidance on scaling up your business the right way.

4. ​​WooCommerce Product Feed Plugin

WooCommerce Product Feed allows you to generate highly optimized product feed files for top eCommerce platforms like Google Shop, Facebook Shop, TikTok, Pinterest, Bing, Idealo, and more. This plugin lets you automatically schedule your product feed to update listings on these sales channels so that your product listings are never outdated. 

Moreover, the WooCommerce Product Feed plugin has advanced filtering options so that you can have category-specific feeds or selectively include/exclude items depending on what you want. Product feed for WooCommerce supports all the major eCommerce channels, which is best suited for most users. You can also generate custom data feed files for use in any sales channel. It is available in both free and paid versions, with the paid version offering more features that give better control over filtering and scheduling.

5. WooCommerce Bookings

If appointments, reservations, or rentals are the lifeline of your business, WooCommerce Bookings is the ideal plugin for you. By integrating this plugin, customers can make bookings directly from your website, immediately marking your calendar as a booking.

It accepts group and individual bookings and can even limit the number of participants. The plugin also provides booking confirmations, automated reminders, and flexible pricing. It integrates with Google Calendar to ensure that bookings happen independently and are well-planned.

6. Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO is a user-friendly plugin that makes your website more SEO-friendly without requiring much technical know-how. The plugin can integrate with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, providing a treasure trove of data about your site inside WordPress, such as the best keywords to use in your posts, the most visited traffic sources to your website, and other key SEO metrics. 

This plugin provides AI-powered content writing assistance with its rich snippet and integration, further elevating your SEO strategy. It also provides LSI keyword suggestions in the form of multiple keyword variations of the focus keyphrase, improving content relevance, increasing search ranking, and driving organic traffic. Rank Math SEO makes even the most complex SEO tasks easier for all types of users.

7. WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway

The WooCommerce Stripe Plugin connects Stripe Payment Gateway seamlessly into your store with over 20 payment methods supported, including credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and many others.

It is built to minimize cart abandonment, with an intuitive checkout process and high security standards from Stripe, including 3D Secure and Strong Customer Authentication, which makes payments from the store safe.

The plugin supports recurring payments for stores that use WooCommerce subscriptions. The free version of the Stripe payments plugin supports all major payment methods, but recurring payments for subscriptions are only available with the paid version, which costs $59 for a year. 

8. WooCommerce PayPal Payments

The WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin allows for easy integration of the payment gateway into your WooCommerce store. With the plugin integrated, your store can accept virtually all kinds of payments, including PayPal, Venmo, SEPA, and all major debit and credit cards. 

PayPal security standards like encryption and multi-factor authentication ensure security. Such security safeguards your transaction and enhances customer trust. This plugin’s main features include the ability to allow customers to check out from any product page using PayPal Express Checkout, hold payments for later settlements, provide full or partial refunds, customize payment fields, and offer guest checkout for non-PayPal users. 

Getting this plugin is a sure way to enhance the payment processing capabilities of your WooCommerce store while maintaining top-notch security. A free version of the PayPal payments plugin is also available in the WordPress repository.

9.  Google Analytics for WooCommerce 

The Google Analytics for WooCommerce plugin is an advanced solution that can provide insights into your store’s performance. The data keeps you in the loop regarding which channels drive more traffic, including search, social, and email. This, in turn, helps you fine-tune your marketing strategies accordingly.

It tracks customers’ actions, providing detailed data about transactions, traffic, and revenue per product. Integration with enhanced eCommerce analytics also gives you valuable information about product views and actions in the cart, among other important metrics that help you improve store performance.

The plugin also excludes visits by administrators and supports display advertising, so you can refine your SEO and advertising policies by relying on accurate and actionable data.

10. WooCommerce Product Recommendations

If you are looking for a way to intelligently suggest products to customers and drive sales, the Product Recommendations for WooCommerce plugin is the perfect solution. The plugin can increase your store’s average order value by suggesting products to customers according to their preferences. 

It supports multiple types of products – simple, grouped, variable, and subscription and automatically filters out-of-stock items so that all recommendations remain relevant and actionable.

You can easily set up which products to recommend and decide exactly when and where to showcase them. With features like upsells, cross-sells, and frequently bought together options, this advanced plugin ensures that product recommendations are accurate and encourages customers to increase their order totals.

The plugin is available in both free and paid versions. The free version of the WooCommerce product recommendations plugin offers enough functionality for most stores, while the premium version opens up various features for crafting advanced and highly engaging product recommendations.

11. Checkout Fields Manager

With WooCommerce Checkout Fields Manager, you maintain complete control over your store’s checkout pages. It makes your store’s checkout experience simple and personalized. The plugin lets you add and manage custom fields, enabling you to collect essential data about your customers through different input types, such as text fields, dropdowns, radio buttons, and even file uploads.

This extension also lets you customize your default billing and shipping fields by changing their labels, sorting order, and visibility. By only displaying the fields that matter to your business and customers, you can maintain a clean checkout page.

Checkout Fields Manager features a specific VAT field with validation to gather VAT numbers during checkout. Additionally, with the role-based restriction feature, you can show custom and default fields to specific user roles.

12. WooCommerce Gift Cards

The WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin is a top-rated plugin that enables you to offer redeemable gift vouchers in your WooCommerce store. By integrating this plugin, your customers can purchase gift cards from your store and share them with their loved ones for their special days like Birthdays, Anniversaries, etc. 

With this feature, customers can send electronic gift cards with personalized messages to friends and family members and schedule delivery on special occasions.

This gift card plugin has more than twenty pre-designed templates, which ensure a friendly user experience when sending and receiving gifts. It also offers instant refunds through store credits for returned products.

You can set fixed or variable balances for every gift card and manage user balances directly from your dashboard. The plugin also allows you to set usage restrictions for gift card coupons based on product categories, spending levels, or specific products, giving you enhanced control over how gift cards can be used.

The Gift cards for WooCommerce plugin has a free version on WordPress, but you will have to choose the premium version to access advanced filters, more templates, and an unlimited number of gift cards.

13. Discount Rules and Dynamic Pricing for WooCommerce

The WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts plugin is a valuable tool that you can incorporate into your store to positively impact the sale of goods in shops by offering varied discount options. The discounts include store-wide sales, volume pricing, and price-by-quantity discounts, as well as automated discounts triggered by specific rules.

This plugin makes promotion deals like Buy One Get One (BOGO) offers, category-based deals, and percentage-based offers a breeze. You can also set up a price table for products based on quantity, attracting buyers to order more.

It also supports advanced features like weight-based shipping, scheduled shipping, and customizable discount rules based on cart weight, item count, or specific date ranges. 

14. Smart Coupons for WooCommerce

Offering incentives like coupons or vouchers and festive discounts while running an eCommerce store is crucial. Smart Coupons for WooCommerce is the right plugin to run and manage these promotions and discounts in your online store effectively. It takes the standard usage of coupons to a whole new level in a store by creating more complex discounts and deals. 

With this plugin, you can implement BOGO (Buy One, Get One) coupons, giveaways, gift vouchers, discount rules, and store credits to drive sales. It also enables you to provide full or partial discounts on specific products, set coupon limitations, and select particular items for BOGO promotions.

In summary, Smart Coupons handles everything from issuing and promoting coupons, making it an essential tool for developing smart marketing strategies that encourage purchases and boost sales.

The plugin has free and premium versions. The free version of this WooCommerce coupon plugin offers basic functionalities, whereas the paid version unlocks advanced features that can enhance your coupon management and marketing strategies. 

15. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce

The Customer Review for WooCommerce plugin makes it easy to collect customer feedback by automatically sending out emails that ask for reviews after purchases. This feature is essential for engaging users and enhancing search engine optimization by adding valuable user-generated content to your product pages.

Additionally, it supports integration with Google Shopping and enables you to import and export review data. By streamlining the review collection process, it helps establish trust and social proof for your business, encouraging potential customers to feel confident in their purchases. Overall, this tool is very effective for significantly increasing sales in your store.

16. Affiliate Program for WooCommerce  

The WooCommerce Affiliate Program plugin lets you set up and manage affiliate programs for your store, allowing others to promote your products. This can help reduce your traffic and sales expenses.

The plugin streamlines the process of onboarding and managing affiliates, making it simpler to expand your affiliate network. These capabilities can greatly enhance your business growth and improve customer acquisition, making it a vital tool for boosting visibility and sales in your store.

17. Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce 

Advanced Shipment Tracking (AST) is a powerful plugin for WooCommerce that enhances order fulfillment and shipment processes. The plugin offers integrations with ShipStation, WooCommerce Shipping, Ordoro, Royal Mail Click & Drop, Dear Inventory, Ali2Woo, Printful, and more, automating your fulfillment workflow. 

There’s a centralized dashboard to manage and fulfill orders, track orders by item, and attach tracking numbers. You can create custom email templates with responsive tracking widgets and set up a custom shipping workflow with specific order statuses. It supports CSV imports, making the update of tracking numbers highly efficient.

The plugin also provides a Shipment Tracking API, where one can integrate third-party services, which helps manage shipments and boost customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Choosing the right plugin can be overwhelming, especially with the increasing number of options available for your site. 

These curated plugins, which we have listed, are valuable add-ons to your site, vastly improving functionality and extending its capabilities. We hope this article helps you discover the right WooCommerce plugins to elevate your eCommerce store’s efficiency and provide an exceptional customer experience. 

The post Best WooCommerce plugins for your eCommerce Store in 2025! appeared first on Fluent Support.

Shopify dominates its market competitors with a 32% share in the US ecommerce industry.

But as it is so popular, it doesn’t mean it could be the right choice for everyone. Especially those who have small businesses or low budgets.

With its high transaction fees and few blogging features, things can get complicated and annoying over time.

So, what can we use instead of Shopify?

Many Shopify competitors offer alternative plans and features that might be better for certain business owners.

Without further ado, let’s check them out!

Reasons to switch to Shopify competitors

Shopify is a compact store builder with customizable themes, built-in analytics, app integrations, and multiple payment options.

However, some Shopify difficulties and added expenses can make you look for more affordable and simpler competitors.

Without industry experience, many businesses are not clear about what exactly Shopify can provide them.

Here are some difficulties of using Shopify.

1. Pricing

Shopify’s pricing can be a drawback for low-budget businesses. It offers several packages for basic to enterprise-level businesses.

However, even if you choose the basic plan because it seems affordable, the costs can increase quickly with these factors:

• Transaction fees: Additional transactional fees will be added for other payment gateways rather than the Shopify payment.
• Transaction fees: Additional transactional fees will be added for other payment gateways rather than the Shopify payment.
• App subscriptions: The basic plan is limited and will not allow you to install any apps that require an online store channel.
• Themes and design: Premium themes or custom designs can also raise your overall budget.

For businesses with high sales volumes, these costs might be manageable. But for smaller businesses, these can become a financial burden.

2. Difficulty with SEO

Shopify does offer some in-built SEO capabilities. However, they are not as comprehensive as specialized SEO plugins like Yoast SEO available on other platforms.

Furthermore, It has some technical SEO difficulties like:

• Restricted URL Structure: Unlike WordPress or Magento, Shopify’s URL structure is limited. This makes it harder to organize products and categories in a clear, hierarchical way.
• Sitemap Problems: Though Shopify does have its own sitemap functionality, it is not customizable and can sometimes cause fetch issues in the Google Search Console.
• Duplicated Content: Shopify creates multiple URLs for a single product, and while it should automatically set the canonical tag to address this, it can sometimes lead to duplicate content issues.

These challenges can impact your Google rankings and add extra hurdles to your SEO efforts.

3. Complex customization

Shopify’s pre-designed themes can be useful for getting started, especially with its drag-and-drop editor.

However, these layouts often lack exclusivity and require technical skills for advanced customization.

Without knowledge of Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, users might struggle with more complex customizations and may need to hire a developer. This can increase both the cost and complexity of managing a Shopify store.

4. Difficult exit

Since Shopify uses a proprietary system, moving your store to another platform can be very difficult. Transferring your data often requires manual export and adjustments. 

Also, the themes and apps from Shopify aren’t compatible with other sites. Consequently, you may need to redesign your website from scratch with new themes and apps.

Top 5 Shopify competitors for different business models

Now that we have already discussed several drawbacks of using Shopify. Let’s directly jump into the top 5 Shopify competitors. 

We’ll explore the features, pros, and cons of top Shopify competitors to help you find the best match and scale your business model.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a self-hosted plugin that can directly integrate ecommerce into your existing website. If you are already using WordPress or considering it, then WooCommerce can be a great option.

It allows more control and flexibility over your store’s customization that might not be found in Shopify. You can make it a mighty and unique online store with multiple WordPress plugins and themes.

However, finding the right combination of plugins and good hosting may need some extra amount of knowledge. 

Key features of WooCommerce

Here’s a list of key features of WooCommerce:

Pros

• Free features to build and manage your online store without hidden costs.
• Choose from thousands of WordPress themes to match your brand.
• Regular security updates and code reviews from a dedicated expert team ensure platform safety.
• Built on WordPress, WooCommerce uses its SEO-friendly framework and best web practices.
• Perfect for businesses wanting full control over their website because of advanced customization flexibility.

Cons

• You can only use WooCommerce with a WordPress website, not by itself.
• You have to install, set up, and configure it manually, which can be hard for beginners.
• Hosting isn’t included, so you need to find and pay for your own.
• While WooCommerce is free, many key features need paid plugins (like advanced shipping and payment options).
• There’s no mobile app to manage your store, unlike Shopify or BigCommerce.

Pricing:

Free Plan: $0 (Core plugin + basic setup)

Pro Plan: $300–$1000+ per year (with premium themes, extensions, and hosting)

Costs vary based on added features.

Verdict: Highly customizable and perfect for those already familiar with WordPress, but requires technical know-how and self-hosting.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a flexible open-source platform specifically for all sizes of ecommerce businesses. Its advanced features and tools are specially designed to enhance scalability and sales.

One of its most popular features is the abandoned cart saver. It automatically sends reminders to customers who added products to the cart and encourages them to complete their purchases. This ability can recover a large portion of your lost sales.

To enhance your customer relationship management, BigCommerce integrates with popular CRMs like HubSpot. This allows you to streamline your sales and marketing efforts.

However, BigCommerce has a small user base and a limited app store compared to Shopify. It’s still a feature-rich platform with good capabilities that doesn’t require additional app purchases.

Key features of BigCommerce

Here’s a list of key features of BigCommerce:

Pros

• BigCommerce is compact with built-in tools like SEO, product filtering, and multi-channel selling without needing apps.
• Multiple payment options and shipping carrier integration without any extra transaction fees.
• Customized URLs and supports AMP to improve your search engine rankings.
• PCI compliance and fraud prevention tools protect your store from security threats.
• Provides advanced features like customer groups and customizable checkout options.
• Perfect for businesses needing advanced SEO tools, in-depth reporting, or large inventory systems.

Cons

• Limited control over hosting and server configuration as it’s a hosted solution.
• Advanced customizations may require developer expertise and additional costs.
• Too many themes and plugins can sometimes lead to compatibility issues.
• Multi-store features can be overwhelming and may require significant setup.
• Customizable checkout can be complex and may require additional development.

Pricing:

Free Plan:  No free plan available.

Pro Plan: $39 – $399 per year (custom enterprise deals available)

Costs vary by plan, but there are no additional transaction fees.

Verdict: Ideal for larger businesses that need built-in features and scalability without relying heavily on third-party apps.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a dedicated website builder that also provides online store plans. It offers a wide range of dynamic templates, display options, and editing tools to make your ecommerce website more creative and attractive. 

While it may not offer all the kinds of store features and facilities that other ecommerce sites have, if you are an individual artist or a blogger or selling creative appliances, it can be a great choice to create a visually stunning site to connect with your audience.

Key features of Squarespace

Here’s a list of key features of Squarespace:

Pros

• All-in-one platform simplifies setup, offering hosting, design, and ecommerce in one place.
• Integrated cart recovery helps recover abandoned sales and boost revenue.
• Built-in payment gateways make accepting credit cards and other payment methods easy.
• Built-in SEO tools help optimize content for search engines without needing third-party plugins.
• Drag-and-drop functionality enables quick changes without needing coding knowledge.

Cons

• Lacks the flexibility of open-source platforms for highly custom ecommerce needs.
• Customization options are limited compared to competitors like WordPress or BigCommerce.
• Does not offer advanced inventory features like bulk editing or multi-warehouse management.
• Fewer payment gateway options compared to platforms like WooCommerce or Shopify.
• Limited customer account features may not be ideal for stores with frequent repeat buyers.

Pricing:

Free Plan:  No free plan available.

Pro Plan: $25 – $72 per month (No transaction fees for higher-tier plans)

Additional costs may apply for custom design features or advanced email campaigns.

Verdict: Best for creatives or small businesses that prioritize design simplicity over complex eCommerce functionality.

Wix

Wix is a budget-friendly website builder with ecommerce facilities. It may not offer extensive features like Shopify. But if you are looking to build a rich, engaging site with little to no web knowledge. Then, Wix makes a good choice. 

It offers drag-and-drop editing of hundreds of industry-relevant themes, which you can then easily customize to put your own visual creativity on your web presence. Much like Squarespace, Wix is also good for content creators looking to showcase portfolios of their work.

Key features of Wix

Here’s a list of key features of Wix:

Pros

• Easy setup and integration allow for quick deployment across multiple channels.
• Fully customizable store design enables brands to maintain their unique identity.
• Supports unlimited products, making it scalable for growing businesses.
• Real-time analytics provide insights into sales and customer behavior for informed decisions.
• Multi-channel selling allows integration with existing websites and platforms like WordPress and Wix.

Cons

• Limited customization for advanced users compared to fully open-source solutions.
• Advanced inventory management features may require third-party integrations.
• Certain payment gateways may incur additional fees, affecting overall costs.
• Multi-store management is available but can be complex for larger operations.
• Users have limited control over some security settings since Ecwid manages the platform.

Pricing:

Free Plan: $0 (Basic website builder)

Pro Plan: $17 – $159 per month (1 year free domain)

Costs can rise with additional apps, advanced features, or third-party integrations.

Verdict: Suited for small businesses looking for a quick setup and ease of use with limited advanced eCommerce needs.

Ecwid

Ecwid offers a quick, easy, and flexible online store in terms of start-up and design. You can integrate it directly with your existing website or build one from scratch. 

Additionally, Ecwid is compatible with most CMS platforms, like WordPress. This means you can easily adapt your site to serve purposes beyond just eCommerce.

Key features of Ecwid

Here’s a list of key features of Ecwid:

Pros

• Supports unlimited products that makes it scalable for growing businesses.
• Multi-channel selling allows integration with existing websites and platforms like WordPress and Wix.
• Easy setup and integration allows for quick deployment across multiple channels.
• Automated invoicing and order tracking simplify back-end operations.
• PCI compliance and SSL support ensure secure transactions and data protection.

Cons

• Limited customization for advanced users compared to fully open-source solutions.
• Some users may find the design options less flexible than competitors like Shopify
• Basic marketing tools may require external integrations for more advanced campaigns.
• Some features may require higher-tier plans, which can increase overall expenses.
• Certain payment gateways may incur additional fees, affecting overall costs.

Pricing:

Free Plan: $0 (Basic plan for up to 10 products)

Pro Plan: $25 – 105 per month (Transaction fees depend on payment gateways)

Costs increase with higher-tier plans or additional features like custom themes or advanced integrations.

Verdict: Perfect for small businesses because of its easy setup and multiple selling platforms. But it doesn’t have all the advanced features of larger eCommerce solutions.

Wrapping up

Shopify is often seen as the go-to platform for running an online store because of its dedicated and advanced store features.

However, when exploring Shopify competitors, it’s important to consider your current and future business needs. Are you just looking for a versatile website builder to attract traffic? Or, are you a creative person who wants to showcase a blog or visual content?

Maybe you’re already using a high-traffic sales model or a WordPress site. No matter your situation, one of the platforms we’ve listed here can support your business journey.

The post Top 5 Shopify Competitors for Different Business Models 2025 appeared first on Fluent Support.

This stat highlights WordPress’s incredible popularity and trust among website owners worldwide. If you’re considering launching an online store, harnessing the power of WordPress for e-commerce could be your key to success.

Let’s explore how you can leverage this versatile platform to build your business and establish a solid online presence.

Benefits of using WordPress for e-commerce

WordPress offers user-friendly tools and plugins, perfect for beginners and seasoned developers. The flexibility and customization options make it a popular choice for e-commerce.

User-friendly tools and plugins

WordPress is renowned for its extensive plugins and tools that simplify the process of building and managing an online store. These tools are designed to be user-friendly, making it easy to build an e-commerce site. 

Here are some plugins that stand out:

WooCommerce: This e-commerce plugin is highly popular on WordPress, and for good reason. It transforms your website into a complete online store, offering product management, payment processing, and order tracking features.

Easy Digital Downloads: This plugin is perfect for selling digital products. It has an easy-to-use interface for handling downloads and payments.

Yoast SEO: Good visibility on search engines is essential for attracting customers to your store. Yoast SEO is a useful tool that makes your site more visible in search results.

Customization and flexibility

Whether you’re a small business owner or a large enterprise, WordPress offers many options to create a unique and efficient online store tailored to your needs.

Themes and templates: WordPress provides many themes and templates, both free and premium, designed specifically for e-commerce. These customizable themes allow you to modify various elements such as layouts, colors, fonts, and more to match your brand’s identity.

Plugins: They’re the backbone of WordPress’s flexibility, extending the functionality of your e-commerce store beyond the basics. There are thousands of plugins available, from marketing tools, advanced analytics to customer helpdesks and payment gateways.

Open-source platform: WordPress is an open-source platform. That means its source code is freely available and customizable to match your needs.

Setting up your online store with WordPress

Creating your WordPress online store involves several steps, from choosing a domain to configuring payment methods. Each step is vital to ensure a seamless shopping experience for customers.

Step 1: Pick a domain and hosting provider

Your domain name and hosting provider significantly affect your store’s performance. They also play a significant role in establishing your brand identity and ensuring a smooth user experience. 

Domain name: It should be unique, memorable, and easy to spell. Avoid complex words/phrases that may confuse potential customers. Besides, choose the right domain extension (TLD). The most common is .com, but other options like .store, .shop, or country-specific TLDs (like .co.uk) can also be effective. If your preferred .com domain is unavailable, consider other relevant extensions. You can use services like GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Google Domains for easy domain registration and management.

Hosting provider: It should offer high uptime guarantees (99.9 percent or higher) and fast server speeds to ensure your site loads quickly and remains accessible. Plus, ensure your hosting provider is optimized for WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting plans are worth trying, as they include automatic updates, performance optimizations, and dedicated support for WordPress-related issues.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate: An SSL certificate encrypts data transferred between your site and customers, protecting sensitive information. This feature secures your site and builds trust with your customers.

Step 2: Install WordPress and essential plugins

Once your domain and hosting are set, you can install WordPress and essential plugins. This step ensures your website has the necessary features and functionalities needed to operate smoothly.

WordPress installation: Most hosting providers offer one-click WordPress installation, making the process quick and easy. If your hosting provider doesn’t offer one-click installation, you can manually install WordPress. Download the WordPress package from WordPress.org, upload it to your hosting account with an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client, and access your domain in a web browser to run the installation script.

WooCommerce plugin: WooCommerce transforms your site into a fully functional online shop. From your WordPress dashboard, head to Plugins > Add New, search for “WooCommerce,” and click “Install Now.” Once installed, click “Activate.” 

Additional plugins: You might also want to include helpful plugins like Yoast SEO to improve how your site appears in search engines and Jetpack to make sure your site runs smoothly and stays safe.

Step 3: Design your store

This step goes beyond aesthetics. It’s about making sure visitors have a smooth experience that encourages them to explore, interact, and ultimately buy.

Theme selection: When selecting a theme, consider responsive design (mobile-friendly), customization options (allow you to adjust colors, fonts, layouts, and other visual elements), and e-commerce compatibility (specifically designed for e-commerce).

Customization: Once you’ve chosen a theme, customize it to match your brand’s colors, fonts, and style.

Product listings: You should use high-quality images that showcase your products from different angles. Moreover, write informative and persuasive product descriptions highlighting features, benefits, and unique selling points. And don’t forget to ask customers to leave reviews and show them prominently. This step helps gain trust and show you’re reliable.

Accessibility and usability: Optimize images and use caching plugins to ensure fast loading times. Place prominent CTAs throughout your store, guiding users toward purchasing or signing up for newsletters. Additionally, focus on security by using SSL certificates and reliable payment gateways to keep customer information safe and earn their trust.

Establishing a legal business entity: Forming an LLC in Georgia

Running a successful online business goes beyond just having a functional website. You must also consider the legal aspect. Registering your business as an LLC in Georgia is a strategic move that can safeguard your personal assets and ensure legal compliance. This business structure is a great choice for entrepreneurs, offering many advantages.

Benefits of starting an LLC in Georgia

Starting an LLC in Georgia has some special benefits, including:

Easy registration for out-of-state LLCs: Georgia makes it simple for LLCs from other states to register and do business here, helping businesses expand easily.

No annual reports for single-member LLCs: If you are the only member of your LLC, you don’t have to file annual reports, which means less paperwork and lower administrative costs.

No tax on retirement income: Georgia doesn’t tax retirement income, which is great for LLC owners who are planning for retirement.

Business incentives and grants: Georgia offers financial support through incentives, grants, and tax credits, especially for tech, manufacturing, and film production businesses.

Low taxes: Georgia has a low corporate tax rate and offers tax breaks for creating jobs, doing research, and other business activities, making it a good place to start and grow an LLC.

Great location: Georgia’s location with major transportation hubs like the Port of Savannah & Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport makes it easy to access national and international markets.

Strong infrastructure: Georgia has a well-developed infrastructure with good transportation networks, technology resources, and business support services, providing a solid foundation for running a business.

These benefits make Georgia a great place to start an LLC, offering strong support for business growth and expansion.

Steps to form an LLC in Georgia

Forming an LLC in Georgia is a straightforward process. It offers significant benefits, including liability protection and operational flexibility. 

Suppose you’re curious. Here’s how to start an LLC in Georgia:

Step 1: Choose a name: Select a unique and distinguishable name for your LLC that complies with Georgia’s naming requirements. The name must include “Limited Liability Company,” “LLC,” or an abbreviation like “L.L.C.” or “Ltd. Liability Co.”

Step 2: File your Articles of Organization with the Georgia Secretary of State: This step involves preparing and submitting the Articles of Organization. These documents formally create your LLC and include important information like your LLC’s name, address, details of your registered agent, and the purpose of your business.

Step 3: Create an Operating Agreement: While not required by Georgia law, drafting an Operating Agreement is highly recommended. This document outlines your LLC’s ownership and management structure, as well as operational procedures and rules. It helps clarify responsibilities among members and reinforces the LLC’s separate legal status.

Legal and financial considerations

When launching an e-commerce store with WordPress, ensuring legal compliance and managing finances properly are critical for long-term success and protection. 

Obtaining an EIN: An Employer Identification Number (EIN) is essential for your business, even if you don’t have employees. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) issues this number, which acts as a unique identifier for tax purposes. It’s necessary for filing taxes, opening a business bank account, and conducting other financial transactions.

Opening a business bank account: Consider keeping your personal finances separate from your business finances for clear legal and financial understanding. Select a bank that provides services tailored to businesses, including online banking, merchant services, and possibly loans in the future, to meet all your needs.

State compliance requirements: Each state has specific business compliance requirements, including annual reporting and tax obligations. In Georgia, for instance, LLCs must submit an Annual Registration with the Secretary of State to maintain their legal status. Depending on your business activities, you may have additional licensing or regulatory requirements to fulfill. So, you should stay informed about these requirements and deadlines.

Combining your e-commerce store with business operations

Integrating your e-commerce store with your overall business operations is crucial for efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction. Here’s how you can seamlessly merge your online store with your business processes:

Inventory management

Efficient inventory management is necessary to avoid stockouts and overstock situations, ensuring smooth order fulfillment.

Inventory plugins: Utilize plugins like WooCommerce’s inventory management or specialized plugins such as TradeGecko or Katana to track stock levels, manage product variants, and automate reorder points.

Automation: Set up automated notifications for low stock levels or integrate with your suppliers’ systems for real-time updates.

Reporting: Generate reports to analyze sales trends, identify fast-moving products, and optimize your inventory strategy.

Payment processing

Streamlining payment processes enhances customer experience and ensures secure transactions.

Payment gateways: Integrate trusted payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, or Square to accept payments seamlessly. Ensure compatibility with major credit cards and alternative payment methods.

Multi-currency support: Cater to global customers by supporting multiple currencies and displaying prices in local currencies. Use geo-location tools to automatically detect a customer’s location and adjust currency options accordingly.

Fraud prevention: Implement robust fraud detection tools and practices, such as address verification systems (AVS) and CVV checks, to protect against fraudulent transactions.

Customer service

Providing exceptional customer service builds loyalty and encourages repeat business.

Support channels: Offer support channels such as live chat, email support tickets, and a dedicated customer service phone line. Use chatbots to handle common inquiries and escalate complex issues to human agents.

Customer relationship management (CRM): Utilize CRM software like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho CRM to manage customer interactions, track customer preferences, and personalize marketing campaigns.

Feedback and reviews: Encourage customers to share thoughts through automated emails or rewards. Stay alert to reviews and respond quickly to show customers their opinions matter.

Conclusion

Mastering e-commerce with WordPress involves leveraging its powerful tools, customizing your store, and ensuring legal compliance. By following this guide, you can create a successful online store and establish a solid business foundation.

The post Mastering eCommerce With WordPress: Launching Your Store as a Legal Business appeared first on Fluent Support.

Now, online carts are crucial, letting users shop easily. But, Cart Abandonment is a big problem, with almost 7 out of 10 customers leaving without buying.

To fix this, we need strategies to cut Cart Abandonment Rates, making online shopping better for both customers and businesses. Let’s check out some solutions.

What is Cart Abandonment Rate?

Cart Abandonment Rate means the percentage of individuals who begin adding items, to their shopping carts but ultimately decide not to make a purchase. This metric indicates how frequently customers leave without finalizing their transactions.

While the acceptable abandonment rate can vary depending on the industry the average, for eCommerce stands at 68%.

Here is a simple formula you can use to determine this rate:

For example, if a retailer had 500 initiated carts and 150 of them were abandoned:

Cart Abandonment Rate= (150 / 500) × 100 = 30

So the Cart Abandonment Rate is 30%.

Top 5 Reasons for cart abandonment and how to reduce them easily

“Cart abandonment is a tale of missed opportunities and transactions that could have happened.”

A shopper, drawn in by enticing ads and exciting products, explores an online store. However, despite all your efforts to engage them, many abandon their carts. This leaves you puzzled.

But, what can be the reason for this? Let’s uncover these reasons now that contribute to high cart abandonment rates, along with some additional tips on how to reduce them.

1. Unexpected high costs

“49% of shoppers say surprise expenses are the main reason for cart abandonment” (Baymard Institute). To fix this, your business should be transparent about costs upfront.

2. Mandatory account creation

A shopper attracted by an ad might get put off if forced to create an account during checkout. To improve, avoid making account setup mandatory for a smoother experience.

3. “Window Shopping”

Often when people casually browse online they may leave items, in their carts without making a purchase. To encourage these browsers to become shoppers consider providing exclusive promotions and time-limited discounts. Additionally offering tailored product suggestions sending follow-up emails, for abandoned carts, and triggering notifications based on their browsing habits can be strategies.

These actions serve as reminders or opportunities to engage customers genuinely enhancing the likelihood of completing a transaction.

These are for gentle reminders or to capture genuine interest and boost the chances of a successful purchase.

4. Limited payment options

Shoppers value options, even in payment methods. If you don’t provide a good range of choices, it can lead to cart abandonment. Therefore, try to offer diverse payment options to meet customer preferences.

5. Website security concerns

In many cases, people don’t trust businesses that lack certain elements. These elements are transparency in pricing, a seamless checkout process, transparent policies, clear communication, reliable customer support, and secure payment options. You need to put these in the right place. Also, make sure to display trust badges and SSL seals.

Cart abandonment recovery tools

With the help of the right tools, you can recover potentially lost sales. Here’s a list of effective cart abandonment recovery tools, applicable across various platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Squarespace.

1. Abandoned cart recovery apps

Abandoned Cart Recovery Apps like Recover Abandoned Cart WooCommerce, FluentCRM, automate and personalize. These tools target emails that are sent based on customer behavior. This technical approach effectively re-engages potential buyers, playing a crucial role in reducing cart abandonment across diverse e-commerce platforms.

Platforms: WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento

2. Fluent Support – Customer support tool

Fluent Support tailored for WordPress revolutionizes customer service. Its intuitive ticket dashboard, advanced filtering, and custom tags streamline support. It ensures efficient customer interactions. Thus, it directly contributes to reduced cart abandonment rates.

Platform: WordPress

3. Hotjar – Website analytics tool

Hotjar aids in multi-platform cart abandonment reduction. It provides insightful heatmaps and surveys to pinpoint reasons for exits during checkout. This technical analysis empowers your strategic adjustments.

Platforms: WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Squarespace

4. Crazy Egg – Website optimization tool

Crazy Egg stands out as an enterprise-friendly solution. A/B testing and user surveys go beyond basics. This tool’s technical prowess allows businesses to comprehend user interactions intricately.

Platforms: WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Squarespace

5. PushOwl – Web push notification platform

PushOwl harnesses the power of push notifications. For platforms like Shopify, this tool sends real-time alerts to users’ devices. These notifications serve as timely reminders or offer exclusive deals. This helps reduce cart abandonment by keeping the brand at the forefront of customers’ minds.

Platform: Shopify

6. WP Social Ninja – Social feed & review plugin

WP Social Ninja transforms your WordPress site into a conversion powerhouse. It actively reduces cart abandonment rates by seamlessly integrating social reviews, offering real-time social feeds, and providing 24/7 messenger chat.

Platform: WordPress

7. Trust seal & trust logo

Trust Seal & trust logo offers vital security assurance. “Displaying trust seals directly combats the 17% cart abandonment due to lack of trust” (Baymard Institute). This technical solution ensures a secure environment for customers.

Platforms: Compatible with most e-commerce platforms

How to find or calculate Cart Abandonment Rate on different platforms?

We usually do business in e-commerce using well-known platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, etc. Despite each platform presenting metrics differently, the Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate is always calculated the same way.

To determine or calculate this rate on these platforms,

• Navigate to the analytics or dashboard section of your e-commerce platform.
• Locate abandoned cart data under sales or checkout analytics.
• Identify the number of abandoned carts.
• Divide this by the total number of initiated checkouts.
• Multiply the result by 100 to get the Cart Abandonment Rate as a percentage.
• If you don’t get it directly use a cart abandonment plugin

Here are some popular examples:

Shopify:

• Go to your Shopify dashboard.
• Navigate to “Analytics” and select “Reports.”
• Look for “Abandoned Checkouts” to find the number of abandoned carts.
• Calculate the abandonment rate manually.

WooCommerce:

• Access your WordPress admin panel.
• Navigate to “WooCommerce” and click on “Reports.”
• Look for “Abandoned Carts” to find relevant data.
• Manually calculate the abandonment rate or consider using a plugin like ‘WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart‘.

Magento:

• Log in to your Magento admin panel.
• Go to “Reports” and choose “Marketing.”
• Select “Shopping Cart Price Rules” and find the “Abandoned Carts” section.
• Calculate the abandonment rate manually, explore extensions or integrate Google Analytics

BigCommerce:

• Access your BigCommerce dashboard.
• Navigate to “Analytics” and choose “Abandoned Cart Reports.”
• Find information on abandoned carts and calculate the abandonment rate.

Squarespace:

• Squarespace may not directly display cart abandonment rates.
• Consider integrating third-party analytics tools or e-commerce plugins that offer this feature.
• Alternatively, review completed and pending orders to estimate abandonment, though it may not provide a precise rate.

Final thoughts

Lastly, as a business owner, in the e-commerce industry, it’s essential to see abandoned carts not as a hurdle but as a chance, for expansion. Take the time to understand your customers. Their preferences, actions, and worries. Collect enough data to analyze them and use it to your advantage, and also to help your customers.

By embracing this customer-centric approach and consistently improving your methods you set the stage for long-term prosperity and building customer loyalty.

The post Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate – How to Reduce It in 2025 appeared first on Fluent Support.

X or formerly known as Twitter is probably the most popular among customers. Especially when they want to get in touch with brands. In this article, we’ll look at how you can provide stellar customer support on Twitter.

Why Twitter?

A staggering 74% of consumers following brands on social media choose Twitter (X) as their got-to platform. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

More than half, 53% to be exact, of surveyed social media users consider how brands publicly address questions or resolve issues as valuable.

Even moreso, a-third (34%) of surveyed Twitter users reported making a purchase after getting a positive customer experience from their brands.

These statistics make it obvious that Twitter isn’t just a platform for socializing; it’s a tool influencing both brand perception and consumer purchasing decisions. Elons digital town square is where your customers are talking about your business. You need to be there to make the most of it.

12 tips for providing customer support on Twitter

When you’re starting off with support on Twitter there’s so much going on. Take these 12 tips to streamline your Twitter support process.

Create a dedicated support presence

The first step in optimizing your Twitter strategy for customer service is to have a dedicated support handle. Your customers need to know exactly which handle to knock with an issue. This also protects your main brand handle from being spammed with radical support claims. Here’s what Fedex Canada did,

Crafting a customer-centric profile

Next, optimize your support handle’s profile. Clearly communicate your purpose and include essential contact information. A well-crafted bio, along with a link to your support portal, ensures that users can easily find the assistance they need.

Real-time monitoring

Twitter is a dynamic platform, and real-time monitoring is the standard. Regularly check mentions and direct messages to ensure no customer is speaking in the wind. Prompt responses not only resolve issues swiftly but also contribute to higher customer satisfaction.

Strategic hashtag use

Boost the discoverability of your support handle by incorporating relevant hashtags. Whether it’s #WordPress or industry-specific tags, strategic hashtag use can extend your reach and attract users seeking assistance.

Proactive engagement: FAQs and tips

Take a proactive approach by sharing frequently asked questions and helpful tips. By providing valuable insights, you not only assist customers  but also position your brand as an authority in the industry.

Personalized and conversational tone

When engaging with users, take a personalized and conversational approach. Try to address users by their name, empathize with their concerns, and provide solutions in a friendly manner. Keep the tone positive and understanding at all times.

Directing users to resources

For common issues, guide customers to relevant knowledge base articles, tutorials, or documentation. Empowering customers with self-help options enhances their experience and reduces dependency on your support team.

Swift acknowledgment and apology

Issues are always there. When they come up acknowledge them promptly. Apologize for any inconvenience and assure customers that you are actively working towards a resolution. Transparency is key in maintaining customer trust.

Retweet positive feedback

Highlighting positive experiences can be a powerful engagement strategy. Retweet positive feedback and success stories to boost morale within your team and demonstrate your commitment towards customer satisfaction.

Monitor competitors for industry insights

Keep an eye on your competitors’ support handles to stay informed about industry trends, customer pain points, and best practices. This gold mine of information can help improve your own support strategy.

Exclusive offers

Your support handle isn’t just about issues though. From time to time you can promote exclusive offers or discounts for users facing challenges. Transforming a negative experience into a positive one is a win for customer support.

Analyze posts for common issues

Complaints on Twitter let you track the repeat issues with your brand. This lets you find the pattern in customer queries while also pointing out the exact point where customers are facing the most issues. Finding this pattern will enable you to improve your offer and help customers.

Wrapping Up

There you have it folks. 12 tips to offer remarkable customer support on Twitter. If you’ve got more things to add let us know in the comments. May your support journey on Twitter be fruitful for you and your customers.

Until next time, happy serving!

The post Customer Support on Twitter (how to make it work) appeared first on Fluent Support.

Most businesses struggle with customer acquisition due to a lack of an effective acquisition strategy. There’s a bit of irony here because customer acquisition directly affects your growth. The slower you are at doing it, the less likely you are to succeed.

Which is sort of why we want to cover why customer acquisition strategies are important and how you can find the best channels for it. We’ll add how you can reduce the cost of customer acquisition too. So let’s get to it!

What does customer acquisition mean?

As we’ve mentioned, customer acquisition is the process of racking up more customers. So where does it actually start?

The acquisition process starts at the first contact a customer makes with your business. From there it’s the buyer’s journey that ultimately leads to them becoming paying customers. This is part of the reason why most experienced marketers consider the buyer’s funnel part of the customer acquisition process.

It’s important to note that after you’ve turned potential customers into paying ones, the challenge is to keep them on board. That’s where retention comes in. The sad part is no retention strategy works 100%. You can expect to lose a percentage of customers due to lackings in your retention strategy. 

Customer acquisition is the only process that will make up for the lost customers by creating new ones. So if you think retention isn’t working as expected, you need to up your acquisition game. 

How do you acquire customers?

Like most business goals, customer acquisition needs a clear strategy and understanding. We like to think of it like this,

To efficiently acquire customers you need to first understand the concept of the acquisition funnel. Once you’ve got that down, the next step is developing a strategy. This process is undeniably hard because you need to know and evaluate a load of factors before you have a customer acquisition strategy worth implementing. 

The Customer Acquisition Funnel

If you’ve been working with businesses the Funnel is a very familiar shape. A lot of the general strategies for customer initiation is visualized in this manner. The customer acquisition funnel is no different.

At face value, a customer acquisition strategy is more or less a buyer’s journey. In this funnel, you’ll find prospective leads coming in at the top and paying customers coming out from below. Each step in the funnel is designed to move the customer forward. 

Here’s a clean visualization that might help,

Each step of this funnel needs to have some basic characteristics, call them funnel characteristics if you will.

a. The content needs to be customized according to the steps needed

b. It needs to prepare the customer for the following step

c. Each step should have minimum redundancy  

To craft this funnel and develop a strategy follow the next section.

Developing a customer acquisition strategy

We’re finally ready to get into developing a customer acquisition strategy. We’ve streamlined the whole process to make it efficient and as accurate as possible. So let’s begin,

Identify your ideal customers

For developing the acquisition strategy first, you need to find your ideal customers. It’s important to remember that not everyone is cut from the same cloth. Even if many people are buying from you doesn’t necessarily mean they are the same kinds of people. The same product or service can offer different benefits for different people. 

This is why you need to execute customer profiling to find these differences. Customer profiling lets you create an accurate image of what your ideal customers look like. Having accurate profiles can help you develop an all-encompassing acquisition strategy that works. 

Define your goals

After finding your ideal customers you need to determine exactly what you’re offering to them. That is to say, what your product/service intends to achieve. Along with that, you need to be able to quantitatively measure the outcomes of your goals.

So basically, first determine what your product is supposed to solve, and what it looks like when that goal is achieved. More importantly, you need to know how to measure the success of goals and how they benefit your business both in the long and short run.

Communicate with your customers

We’ve already said this a couple of times already. The feedback you get from customers and even free users can have a huge impact on the acquisition process. Checking customer feedback helps you evaluate how well your product is performing and what needs to change to make it better. 

Having this information lets you develop a strategy that caters to the people who have actual experience with your product. You get to know about inconsistencies in your product and acquire customers that aren’t misled but rather guided.

Acting based on customer feedback eases the process of acquisition and retention alike. So there’s no way you can skip this. Remember, one constructive customer feedback can mount up to more than a year’s worth of research.

Measure and improve your strategy

Lastly, you’ll have to measure the outcomes of your existing strategy. This will tell you what the gaps in your strategy are. For instance, if your strategy is racking up a lot of leads but the leads aren’t converting there could be a problem in your funnel content. 

Knowing exactly where the potential customers are lost is crucial to reimagining the acquisition strategy. A good place to start is deciding what metrics you want to track in the first place. We recommend the following, 

1. Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

2. New acquisition rate

3. Customer lifetime value (LTV)

4. Churn rate

5. Ratio of LTV and CAC 

5 best customer acquisition channels

Now let’s check out the channels you can use for customer acquisition. Keep in mind a strategy for one will not work on the other. To develop unique customer acquisition strategies for each channel. That being said, there needs to be consistency among the channels too.

For example, if your website and email copies do not align in any way, acquiring customers is going to be a hell of a challenge. Mostly because customers won’t feel you are reliable and honestly that’s reason enough.

So here are the channels we recommend,

Content Marketing

If there’s one thing we can say for sure it’s that content marketing is here to stay. It’s an exceptionally good way to acquire customers because it’s a form of marketing that you don’t have to push on to the customers. Rather customers will come looking for relevant and genuine content. 

Content marketing is perhaps the most simple yet multi-faceted channel on this list. Because for one, content marketing has a lot of moving parts. You need to have complementing formats of the same content to engage a variety of audiences. Even though it’s tough, if done right, it offers the most value compared to any other channel.

SEO

Yes, we know SEO is part of what makes content marketing work. But hear us out. 

Content isn’t just blogs, videos, and images. Your website and the stuff you host on it are just as important for SEO as content. 

The search bar is your best friend when it comes to acquisition. Although it’s not an exact reproducible science there’s still a lot you can do by following a recipe. For instance 

• Find and use relevant keywords
• Add alt text to your images
• Include transcripts for both video and audio formats
• Links, links, and more links 

Social Media

Next, we’ve got social media. There are a lot of channels that you can try like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (that’s just the holy trinity.). Apart from that, there’s Linkedin, Quora and some even kill it on Reddit.

The key difference to spot here is organic and paid social media content. While organic creates value and distinction for your brand image, paid ads to push sales and conversions.

A great way to pick the best method is to check what your audience interacts with the best. If your social media posts and images are racking up engagements, paid ads will be an overkill. On the other hand, if your organic engagement isn’t good enough it may be a good time to create unique adverts. 

You’ll also have to factor in the budget that’s needed for both methods. Paid ads are not cheap and neither is a social media manager. So decide wisely before investing in one or the other.

Email

Email is by far the best among these channels for 2 reasons. One, it has the highest ROI, and two, it lets you communicate broad ideas without constraints.

The prime benefit of using email as a customer acquisition channel is that it’s cheap. That’s kind of why the ROI is so absurd at 4200%. The other benefit is customization on an individual level. SEO, social media, and even content aren’t catered to one individual. Email is. 

The only drawback to emails is that you can’t push emails the way you can push ads or content. Your audience needs to specifically agree to get emails from you and even then it might not pan out for a number of reasons.

If you can balance these out, email is by far the best channel. As for best practices, here are a few email tips that you should follow

1. Keep the emails relevant

2. Avoid jargon

3. Offer value in the email itself

Video

The past decade has been all about video marketing. Tiktok, YouTube, and Twitch have revolutionized the video marketing landscape. Video as a form of acquisition has seen immense success.

The main reason behind this success is convenience. Your audience would rather watch a 3 min video than read a 2000-word article. No point in judging that because we’re all guilty of this. Hence, the best thing to do right now is to create content in all forms and distribute them according to the platform’s guidelines.

Video has the incredible power of driving a narrative better than Content and Emails combined. Considering how successful these channels already are, that’s saying a lot.

Best customer acquisition strategies with video are,

• Keep the content in line with your brand
• Repurpose content as much as possible
• Invest in awesome scripts and effective equipment
• Offer transcripts as an alternative

Wrapping up

Wow! We’ve finally covered customer acquisition strategies for 2025! Let’s hope you take what you’ve learned and start developing right away. 

After considering the prospect and scope of your business, create a strategy that prioritizes your offerings first. That’s the most steady way of driving customer acquisition.

Acquiring customers in a way that sets you apart from the rest makes and saves more money. Don’t forget to prioritize your support team in this whole process. Because more often than not people check out support before making the final decision.

Until next time, happy serving! 

The post Customer Acquisition Strategies for 2025 appeared first on Fluent Support.

In this article, we delve into the significance of customer service for small enterprises, tailored advice for different industries, defining good customer service, and an exhaustive list of 20 actionable tips for both product and service-oriented businesses.

So let’s get started!

Why is customer service important for small businesses

Customer service is at the heart of success for businesses. For small businesses, it’s even more true. Consider it like the special ingredient that makes your grandma’s recipe unforgettable. See, it’s not just about fixing things when customers need it. It’s about creating a vibe that customers appreciate. 

Why? 

Well, firstly, customer service builds loyalty, kind of like having your personal fan club. When you treat customers like VIPs, they stick around, and guess what? That costs way less than chasing new customers. 

On the plus side, happy customers turn into your dedicated hype squad. They promote your service to anyone who’ll listen, bringing in new buds without you having to place your product in front of them. 

It’s basically the low-key marketing strategy that works wonders. So, yeah, customer service isn’t just a checkbox—it’s modern marketing and acquisition wrapped into one neat aspect.

Service for different industries

Small businesses encompass a big portion of modern businesses, functioning across industries. So, one size definitely doesn’t fit all when it comes to customer service. For different industries, providing good service means very different things. 

Product-Oriented businesses

For businesses dealing with tangible goods, it’s not just about the product; it’s about the entire unboxing experience. Making that first impression count matters. Good place get started with would be,

• Personalize onboarding for a warm welcome. 
• Go the extra mile with proactive communication. 
• Toss in unexpected goodies to surprise and delight. 
• Create a community around your products—let your customers share the love.

Service-Oriented businesses 

On the flip side of intangible services, it’s all about crafting experiences. A service is more than what you’re doing for the customer. It’s a combination of accessibility, communication and promptness. You can get started by,

• Nail the prompt response time.
• Lay it all out with a detailed service description.
• Keep the conversation going with regular check-ins.
• Don’t forget the post-service follow-up.

Whether you’re shipping products or delivering services, tailoring your customer service vibe to your industry is like adding the touch that just makes everything better.

What is good customer service?

Providing good customer service involves both sticking to established protocols and having the flexibility to go beyond them. Your efforts are all aimed at meeting and surpassing customer expectations. That’s kind of the central objective. That being said good customer service means, 

7 qualities of good customer service

• Empathy; Handle every interaction with empathy and compassion.
• Effective Communication; Communicate ideas effectively and efficiently.
• Patience; Keep your cool and show patience to customers.
• Problem-Solving Skills; Solving problems is always the first priority for service.
• Product Knowledge; Understand the product to ensure steady support.
• Adaptability; Keeping an open mind to new challenges.
• Consistency; Deliver a consistent experience for familiarity.

20 customer service tips for small businesses

Delivering good customer service takes more than just answering questions. It’s the sum of all things you provide a customer when they do business with you. These tips are the way you can make that overall experience a remarkable one.

1. Personalized onboarding

Onboarding is how customers start using your product or service. Consider it like the tutorial level on a video game. Kickstart the customer journey with a personalized touch, ensuring a strong and positive first impression.

2. Proactive communication

Communication is at the heart of customer service. But just waiting and listening isn’t enough for customers. You need to anticipate customer needs by providing relevant information before they even ask, showcasing attentiveness.

3. Efficient returns process

Returns no matter how unpleasant will happen. As a business, you have to make sure that process is not difficult. Simplify and expedite returns to turn potential dissatisfaction into a positive, hassle-free experience.

4. Educational content 

Customers appreciate all the information they can get. You need to ensure that customers can access this information easily. Provide informative content to guide customers in maximizing the utility of your products or services.

5. Surprise and delight 

Who doesn’t love surprises? Customers in general usually love them! Try to occasionally include unexpected perks or discounts to exceed customer expectations and build brand affinity.

6. Community engagement 

Communities are the heart of a successful business. Human beings are tribal as they love to align with a group. Foster a sense of community around your products or services, encouraging customer interaction and loyalty.

7. Prompt response time 

Customers hate waiting. Slow responses frustrate customers impacting their satisfaction with your brand. Address inquiries swiftly and set the tone for efficient service that demonstrates respect towards your customers’ time.

8. Detailed service descriptions 

Anything and everything you offer needs to be obvious and transparent. Clearly articulate what customers can expect, fostering transparency and avoiding misunderstandings.

9. Regular check-ins 

Don’t forget about the customers that have already come in touch with you. Proactively engage with customers to ensure ongoing satisfaction, building a relationship beyond transactions.

10. Personalized recommendations 

Recommendations are meant to help customers find the best output from your business. Tailor service or product recommendations based on customer preferences and purchase history. Not to mention, it helps you upsell and cross-sell more products.

11. Timely service updates 

Timing is crucial for modern customers. Keep customers informed about the status of their service requests or product deliveries at every stage. Especially when your customers are other businesses. 

12. Post-service follow-up

Solving the issues is half the work. Following up and making sure the customer got exactly what they needed is just as important. Seek feedback after service delivery, demonstrating a commitment to continuous improvement.

13. Social media monitoring 

Customers are talking about brands all the time, and social media is where they’re talking about it. Stay attuned to customer sentiments and address issues promptly on social platforms, showcasing responsiveness.

14. Knowledge base software

Self-help isn’t just a passing fad. Customers like figuring things out for themselves. Create a comprehensive repository of FAQs and guides or a dynamic knowledge base for self-service, empowering customers.

15. Ticketing systems

A ticketing system is a must if you want your service process to be smooth. A proper ticketing system can streamline service requests for organized and timely resolutions, ensuring no customer query falls through the cracks.

16. Customer feedback software

We’ve already mentioned the importance of customer feedback. To collect and manage this efficiently you will need a feedback system. It’ll help you gather insights to continuously refine service or product quality based on real customer experiences.

17. Automation tools

Customer service has its share of repetitive tasks like any other part of a business. To save time and effort, automate repetitive tasks to enhance efficiency for more personalized and meaningful interactions.

18. Appointment scheduling tools

Simplify the booking process for service appointments, minimizing friction for customers. This lets you handle issues professionally without conflict.

19. Customer satisfaction surveys

Surveys are the lifeblood of customer support data. That’s how you know if your efforts are on point. Gauge customer satisfaction levels and pinpoint areas for improvement. 

20. Data 

Leverage insights from your ticketing and feedback system to anticipate customer preferences and behavior. This in turn will help drive informed business decisions.

Why customer service tools matter?

Tools are a big deal because they make the overall customer experience better by giving service teams a clear system to work with.

First off, these tools organize customer interactions, making sure no questions or issues get overlooked. For example, good ticketing systems help businesses handle service requests well, sticking to a step-by-step way of solving problems.

For instance, Fluent Support tracks tickets with high waiting times to ensure customers waiting the longest get the support first. It’s just an easier way to prioritize tickets on the fly.

Next up, in this tech-heavy age, tools like live chat and social media monitoring are a must-have. They let businesses talk to customers in real time, sorting out questions fast. It’s not just about being quick – it’s also about meeting the preferences of today’s customers who want fast solutions.

There’s more – tools like customer feedback software and data analytics are your secret weapons. They help you understand what customers like and how they behave.

Wrapping up

Exceptional customer service serves as the catalyst for transforming regular customers into loyal advocates. As much as 93% of customers express a willingness to spend more on a brand they are loyal to, even when better options are available elsewhere.

Building enduring relationships with customers is very much intertwined with the consistent delivery of exceptional customer service.

The post 20 Best Customer Service Tips for Small Business appeared first on Fluent Support.

So let’s get this straightened out for good.

What makes revenue and sales different 

On the surface, revenue and sales might seem the same— I mean, they both involve money flowing into a business, right? Well, not quite.

In fact, that’s the most common confusion people have when it comes to sales and revenue. 

Sales, in its simplest form, represent the number of products or services a company sells. It’s the millennia-old act of exchanging goods for money. For instance, if your online store sells 100 widgets, your sales for that period amount to 100 units.

On the other hand, revenue casts a much broader net. It consists not just of direct sales but also of other income streams a company might have. Revenue includes not only the money generated from selling products (i.e. the sales revenue) but also income from subscriptions, licensing fees, and even interest on investments and loans, etc.

Revenue reflects the total income a business earns. It offers a more comprehensive view of the financial landscape.

Sales vs. Revenue Compared

Let’s break it down with a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you run a software company. Your primary product is a cutting-edge app, bringing in a substantial portion of your revenue. 

However, you also license your technology to other businesses for a fee and earn interest from investments. While your sales focus on selling the app itself, your revenue encompasses the sales, licensing fees, and interest income—a more holistic measure of your company’s financial status.

Take Tesla’s first-quarter report for 2021 as a prime example of how gross revenue extends beyond the mere sales of its EV’s. While Tesla reported a noteworthy net income of $438 million for the quarter, the spotlight was on its impressive $10.4 billion in revenue.Crucially, Tesla’s gross revenue outpaced its total sales, and here’s why. 

Beyond the core business of selling electric cars, Tesla diversified its income streams. In this particular quarter, the company earned $518 million by selling emissions credits to other automakers, showcasing how non-sales factors significantly contribute to overall revenue. 

Similarly, examining Exxon Mobil Corporation’s financial data for the quarter ending June 30, 2019, provides valuable insights into the distinction between revenue and sales. 

In June 2019, sales and operating revenues amounted to approximately $67.5 billion, reflecting a decrease from the $71.5 billion reported in June 2018. However, total revenue for the same quarter in 2019 was $69 billion, compared to $73.5 billion in 2018. 

This discrepancy highlights the inclusion of additional revenue sources beyond direct sales in the total revenue figure. Notably, for Exxon Mobil, revenues from other sources, such as equity affiliates, contributed significantly, totaling over $1.5 billion in 2019 and $2 billion in 2018. 

Wrapping up: The Bottom Line

In conclusion, while sales are a vital component of revenue, the two are nowhere near the same. Understanding the difference between revenue and sales is pivotal for businesses as is sales and service aiming to evaluate their financial performance accurately.

So, the next time you’re assessing a company’s health, look beyond the sales figures. Delve into the broader picture painted by its total revenue, and you’ll gain a more nuanced understanding of its financial soundness.

The post Revenue vs. Sales: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Fluent Support.

A big part of a startup’s success (or failure) depends on its ability to attract new customers and make sales. After all, startups are businesses and the bottom line is the primary concern.

That being said, attracting new customers or as marketing teams like to call it, customer acquisition is the biggest challenge fresh startups face. We’re here to change that, at least for the splendid people reading this blog.

In this article, we’ll look at the definition of customer acquisition, customer acquisition strategies for startups, and how to measure your customer acquisition strategies. 

Definition of customer acquisition

Customer acquisition is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers and converting them into paying customers of a business. The whole acquisition process involves multiple steps and each step requires its own strategies to ensure leads convert into buying customers at the end of the process.

Customer Acquisition Strategy for Startups

For startups, the acquisition process is fairly similar to more traditional businesses. However, the strategies can vary depending on the particular requirements of the startup. In short, there’s no one-size-fits-all plan for customer acquisitions. So let’s get started with bringing more customers for your startup.

Targeting

The first step to acquiring new customers is identifying the right people. As the saying goes, 

If you’re selling to everyone, you’re not selling to anyone.

So it’s crucial to find the ideal people who have use for your solutions and are willing to commit hard-earned dollars to purchase them. Targeting customers involves the following process,

Determine Market size

The market size is the maximum number of people that are looking for the solution you provide. Understanding the market size allows you to project the highest potential number of customers that you can acquire. 

No single company owns 100% market share nowadays, so it’s safe to assume your startup won’t either. But understanding the market size puts you in a position to evaluate your share of the market and whether that portion is enough to sustain your startup.

More importantly, market sizing allows you to estimate the investment (resources, personnel, infrastructure) to support the projected market size. This ultimately has a huge impact on your customer acquisition strategy.

Market sizing is usually done in 2 broad methods. 

1. Top-down 

2. Bottom up

Create Buyers Persona

Once you’ve identified the market size it’s time to define the buyer persona of your target customers. Creating a buyer persona is a broad process on its own, and kind of beyond the scope of this article. However, you can consider creating a buyer persona similar to developing customer profiles.

Fundamentally, a buyer’s persona is a set of characteristics that accurately identify your target customers. Most businesses usually require multiple personas to effectively segment their potential customers. This allows you to customize and personalize your acquisition and retention strategies for each segment for the most efficiency.

Identify effective channels

Once you’ve identified the target personas, it’s time to determine the most effective channels for reaching them. People of different age groups, locations, and personality traits are not congregating in one giant marketplace. Each of them is connected to their own sphere, and they rarely intersect.

For a startup, you’ll need to find exactly where your target audience is jiving and what their vibe is. The best way to connect with people is to go where they are and find out what they care about. 

Effective channels usually include Social media, Emails, Forums, and websites. Each of these fulfills a different purpose in the way of connecting with your target customers. You need to identify which of these channels will be ideal for each buyer persona, and plan your campaign and strategies around that information.

Strategies for acquiring customers

Once you’ve prepared a buyer persona that fits your customers, now it’s time to drive them through the funnel. An acquisition funnel is a progression where prospective buyers begin interacting with your business and become loyal customers by the end of the progression.

The acquisition funnel (sometimes also known as buyer journey) can be divided into 3 broad stages. Potential customers pass these stages sequentially ultimately leading to a purchase. Each step of the acquisition funnel refers to the psychological stage of a prospect. Because of these distinct mindsets, you need to employ different marketing tactics to effectively drive prospects through the process. 

Let’s check out the steps and the marketing tactics best suited for them,

Awareness stage

The awareness stage revolves around people who are only beginning to explore your niche, and most likely aren’t aware of your startup. The prospects in this stage usually look for information to build “awareness”. So that’s exactly what you need to offer at this stage. 

SEO

Search engine results are the first place people look for things. For startups, this is probably the most important factor for success. The unconventional truth is, 

SEO helps your content reach the target audience through SERPs. But ranking is only half the story. You also need to provide content that people are looking for. In other words, the content you put up for search traffic needs to fulfill a purpose for the readers. 

This involves keyword research, understanding the buyer persona, and developing valuable content. Once you ensure these, you get to a position where you can effectively leverage the traffic that you gain through the SERPs.

Video tutorials

People on average spend 17 hours/week watching online videos. A large portion of this time goes on video tutorials. So educating prospective customers with video tutorials is much more effective. You need to develop videos that are easy to digest and act as a gateway for prospects to become aware of your brand.

Success with video also depends on factors like SEO and content targeting. Your videos need to be focused on topics that resonate with the awareness stage. This means educational and how-to videos on topics that act as a gateway into your startup niche.

Social

Social media acts as a digital billboard for your brand. Your social media strategy needs to accommodate the stages of the acquisition funnel. Ideally, you’d want content that resonates with prospects and positions your brand where they can find it. 

Social presence is an essential part of brand recognition nowadays. So creating a data-driven social media strategy can outperform other traditional forms of acquisition. This “ideal strategy” needs to encompass a variety of practices such as,

Focusing on value; Your social content needs to be relevant to your audience.

Engaging with the audience; Social is less about content and more about people so connect with your audience. 

Building a community; To build on top of an engaged audience, you can foster communities to create a forum of like-minded customers

Using targeted advertising and promotions; Social ads and boosting can increase your reach if done properly.

Lastly, partnering with influencers; Influencers in your niche already have the attention of your audience. No harm in borrowing their “influence” to boost your presence along with it.

Referrals

Referral is basically rewarding the process of inviting new customers to your business. That is an existing customer referring your service to your friends and family, usually to cash in on an incentive. 

The incentives are a crucial part of any referral program. As in what will the customer gain by recommending your product or service to people? Usually, SaaS companies offer free subscriptions and discounts in exchange for referrals. 

However, it can be a double-edged sword if your plans aren’t well thought out. I remember a food delivery app struggling with referrals because their system wasn’t idiot-proofed. They ended up paying customers after delivering items because the referral system was abused beyond repair. To avoid such a conundrum keep these things in mind,

• Offer an incentive that is an incentive, not a post-it “thank you” note.
• Verify the referrals for authenticity.
• Cap the amount of redeemable incentives.

Free tools

Free tools are a great way to both generate leads and identify their awareness stage. You can be pretty sure that an absolute beginner will not be using specific tools unless you develop some understanding and experience with your niche.

So when you get a lead from a free tool, you can be fairly sure the user is at the consideration stage rather than the awareness stage. That being said, it’s actually effective to upgrade awareness stage prospects to the consideration stage by providing a simplified tool for a niche-specific problem.

Consideration stage

Leads in the consideration phase are aware of both their problem and the possible solutions that are available. The challenge here is to shorten the consideration phase and enable them to make a decision. For this goal, you can adopt the following channels,

Content

Content for the consideration phase is quite different from the content designed to build awareness. Your goal here is to provide all the necessary information a prospect needs to make a fast decision. This includes,

Listicles; Compilations of products in your niche that showcase the pros and cons of both your products and your competitors. Check out our listicles on WordPress knowledge base and help desk solutions for a better understanding.

Webinars; Webinars help draw in prospects who are trying to understand the industry standards and in turn the solutions widely accepted by the community.

Case studies; Case studies help showcase the practical utility and benefits of your service or product in a real-world scenario. 

Usually, an acquisition strategy deploys a combination of these content to nurture leads toward the decision-making phase.

Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are the ultimate method of nurturing leads. It provides a channel completely in your control and your audience accepts this content willingly. So you can target your email content specifically for each lead, according to their buyer stage. Not only that, it allows you to retarget existing customers as well for upsell and cross-sell campaigns. 

The best part of using newsletters is they allow you to control your communications in your own private channel. Exposure isn’t dependent on complex search and social algorithms. Making it easier to track and monitor your strategies as well as improving targeting.

Reviews

Your customer reviews are another great way to nudge prospects to make a decision. People have an innate trust in other people’s opinions. Especially, in the B2B space where 92% of customers make a faster purchasing decision after reading a trustworthy review.

Good reviews from reliable sources have a big impact on people considering a service or product. When someone is checking out what your company offers, they’ll look at what others have said to figure out if your product is right for them. 

They’ll consider whether your product fits their needs if your sign-up process and customer support are on point, and if spending the money is worth it. So, reviews really matter from start to finish in the buyer’s journey.

Decision stage

Once you’ve been guided to the “purchase” page it’s all a matter of making the action as lucrative and easy as possible. Even though you’ve provided all the necessary information to help in the decision-making, you need to bridge the gap of making the decision and taking action based on it.

This is where the following techniques help in marketing methods.

Consultations

Consultations help seal the deal by helping customers understand the product fit. Ideally, you’ll need to showcase the learning curve, supporting resources, and onboarding cost of your product or service. It’s a great way to demonstrate the utility of your product/service.    

Discounts

Discounts are the final incentive to lock in the customer. Maybe they like your product or have been considering it for a while. A small onboarding discount can go a long way to reinforce all the techniques you’ve utilized in your acquisition funnel. 

People love to feel special. A custom discount price just for one customer can provide just the right push to make the decision and stop considering other options. 

Customer Acquisition Metrics For Startups

So we’ve covered the basics of acquiring new customers for startups. Now you need to understand how to measure your efforts.

Customer acquisition costs

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the expense spent on attracting new customers to your business. It covers advertising, marketing, and sales costs, excluding production expenses. To calculate CAC, divide the total sales and marketing costs by the number of new customers gained.

The formula: CAC = (Sales cost + Marketing cost) / No. of new customers

Key components of CAC include ad spending, employee salaries (for marketing and sales teams), creative and technical expenses, publishing costs (varies by platform), and production costs (e.g., content creation tools, and equipment).

The higher return on ad spend (ROAS) for driving new customers, the lower the CAC. Similarly, effective sales and marketing teams can reduce the cost per customer acquired. 

CAC:LTV

LTV or Life time value represents the total revenue a customer generates during their entire engagement with your business. This includes repeat purchases, upsells, cross-sells, and any other revenue streams resulting from the customer’s ongoing relationship with your products or services.

The CAC: LTV ratio is the relationship between the cost of acquiring a customer and the potential return on that investment over the customer’s lifetime. It’s calculated by dividing the CAC by the LTV.

A ratio below 1 indicates that the LTV of a customer exceeds the cost of acquiring them. This is generally a positive scenario, suggesting that your acquisition efforts are effective and profitable.

A ratio around 1 suggests a balance between acquisition cost and customer value. It’s important to closely monitor this ratio to ensure it doesn’t tip unfavorably over time.

Conversely, if the ratio is significantly higher than 1, it may signal that your customer acquisition costs are outpacing the potential value those customers bring. This could indicate an issue with your acquisition strategy, retention efforts, or pricing.

Activation Rate

Activation rates are a great way to measure acquisition success rates for SaaS companies. In most cases, companies determine activation rates by measuring engagement with a certain feature, completing a certain action, or achieving a specific outcome. Compared to CAC and LTV, this makes activation rates a more flexible metric. 

Nonetheless, it is an accurate marker of how effectively a startup’s product or service is being adopted and utilized by its user base. The activation point and rates can vary across industries and the goals of your company.

Trial Conversion rate

Trial Conversion Rate is a pivotal metric for startups trying to assess the effectiveness of their customer acquisition strategies. It signifies the percentage of trial users who convert into paying customers after experiencing the startup’s product or service. 

This rate provides valuable insights into the startup’s ability to engage, captivate, and demonstrate value to potential customers.

Formula: Trial Conversion Rate = (Number of Trial Users Who Convert / Total Number of Trial Users) * 100

A higher trial conversion rate suggests successful user engagement, a compelling value proposition, and an effective trial experience. Conversely, a lower rate could indicate room for improvement in onboarding, product communication, or trial duration.

Wrapping up

Acquiring customers is the lifeblood of a startup’s success. But it’s not enough on its own. Bringing in new customers is only half the story. Retaining the customers you bring in is just as important as sustaining the growth you’re working relentlessly for.

At the end, it all comes down to delivering the value you promise and making people aware of what you offer as frequently as possible. The rest will work out well, at least that’s what we wish for your startup.

Until next time, happy serving.

The post Customer Acquisition Strategy for Startups appeared first on Fluent Support.