Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Tools supporting online sales

There's no denying that the direct sales process is often tedious, and achieving high effectiveness often requires considerable effort. Fortunately, we live in an era that allows for the use of tools to automate many aspects of sales. Thanks to them you can save not only time but also resources. What these tools are? This is what we will talk about in this text.

The development of technology means new opportunities for business owners

Technologies developed in recent years not only make it easier to reach potential customers and maintain constant contact with them, but also enable simple management of entire contact databases and efficient management of company finances. This makes the whole sales process take less time. Moreover cloud technology gives access to resources in any place and at any time and the entrepreneur pays only for the functions he actually uses. This allows not only to optimise costs, but also to tailor services to individual companies.

How to improve sales?

The main factor in improving sales is automation. Even a simple introduction of automatically generated e-mails significantly shortens the first stage of sales and gives the seller more time for other tasks. It is also important to organise all sales information. In addition, properly constructed websites are also important – both for the store and for the company as a whole. It is also worth introducing at least several communication channels on the salesman-customer line in order to stay in constant contact and collect opinions on the provided services (the so-called "feedback"). feedback). Each of these goals can be achieved by using an appropriate tool.

Below are some tools that will allow you to noticeably improve your sales activities.

CRM systems

CRM system. Customer Relationship Management is a tool used to manage contacts with customers (current and potential), which allows to archive and organize the company's sales and marketing experience. All data is gathered in one place, so it is easily accessible and can be easily subjected to multidirectional analyses. It allows to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of the actions and to create strategies appropriate to the situation. A well-built CRM system therefore contains a set of tasks, tools and procedures necessary in contacts with customers. Currently, the most popular are online systems, giving access from any device and almost any place – the only limitation is access to the Internet. An example of such a system is edrone.

Google Analytics and Data Studio

Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing traffic statistics and user behavior on websites. The data obtained thanks to it is divided into 5 segments – real-time reports, recipients, acquisition, behavior and conversions. The first one gives information on current visitors – their number, location, source of visit and read content. Reports from the Recipients segment generates data on users from all sessions (including duration of each visit and rejection rate), including demographic and geographical data – on their basis it is possible to determine the target group. Obtaining information on the sources of traffic to the website. Behavioural reports refer to the behaviour of users on a given website – how they move around the site, how long they stay on it and which content they visit most often.

However, from the business point of view the last segment will be the most important, i.e. Conversions. It allows, above all, to determine the amount of revenue generated by the website. Moreover, it enables monitoring of m.in. the number of phone calls, page views or forms sent – depending on the targets selected in the data view. How to use Google Analytics? All you have to do is place an appropriate tag on a given page, generated by Google Tag Manager or a plugin that uploads them automatically.

Google Data Studio is also free and allows you to analyze and visualize data. With its help you can create extensive, multi-page, yet clear reports that can be shared and edited by different users. These reports are easy to analyse and allow you to quickly draw conclusions from your business. It is fully integrated with other applications from Google (Google Analytics, AdWords, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360), and information from other applications can be analyzed after it is prepared in a format .csv /.Google Data Studio is also free and allows you to analyze and visualize xls data and import them in the Data Sources tab.

Live chat

It is a tool for direct communication between a customer and a salesperson (or customer service, advisor or receptionist). It takes the form of a small window, usually placed in the bottom right corner of a website, and allows customers to establish a conversation with the owner of a given website (or its representative) in a few moments. Such additional communication channel allows to m.in. dispel doubts about the offer and increase the number of potential customers. But that's not all – it also provides the company with a control panel, which allows not only to reply to messages, create automatic welcome messages, or change window settings, but also to browse the list of current website visitors.

Messenger

Facebook is now widely used in marketing, and the Messenger messenger integrated with it enables the customer to quickly contact the service provider. Especially since Facebook has made it possible to integrate an online store with a fanpage. This makes it a great solution for small and medium-sized businesses.

Marketing automation tools

Marketing activities can take a lot of time and resources. It is therefore worth introducing tools that automate its processes. How it works? It is mainly about a wide range of personalization possibilities – they allow to monitor users' actions on the website and on their basis to.in. create individual product recommendations, distribute specific content or offer individual discounts. Such prepared offers go to the right people at the right time, which allows you to gain potential customers without inundating users with all possible offers. Examples of such tools are Marketo, ActiveCampaign or PushPushGo.

After-sales mailing

As we know, marketing activities do not end with sales alone. Equally important, and often even more important, is the after-sales activity. And it's not just about collecting feedback – well prepared, personalized after-sales emails (containing e.g. cross-selling offer) can increase profits even from two to five times. Such emails not only have a higher open rate, but also allow you to dynamically adapt to customer expectations. So this is another argument in favour of marketing automation tools – many of them also cover post-sale activities.

Prospecting tools

The initial stage of sales activities, i.e. creating a base of potential customers and establishing positive relations with them (the so-called "sales relationship"), is not just about collecting feedback – well-prepared, personalized post-sale e-mails (containing, for example, a list of potential customers). Prospecting) is often a tedious process. Fortunately, thanks to technological progress, entrepreneurs now have tools that make it much easier. Prospecting tools allow you to m.in. identify potential customers on the basis of their actions on the vendor's website, create personalized advertising campaigns (with the support of artificial intelligence), analyze campaign results and acquire new contacts. This type of tool offers m.in. DMSales.

Monitoring tools

These are tools that allow you to explore opinions about products, quality of service and the company itself. Their operation is based on an algorithm that searches for information based on defined keywords. It is a good way of monitoring the effects of a campaign and learning about the information contained in the Internet about a given company. It also allows you to compare opinions from the last few days or months and thus get a picture of the effectiveness of your actions. This tool is also extremely helpful in creating an image of the company. Examples of such tools are SentiOne and Brand24.

NPS tools

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is an indicator used to measure customer loyalty based on willingness to recommend a particular service to friends and family. In practice, it is used to manage quality and generate an increase in customer satisfaction. According to him, customers are divided into three categories – critics, neutrals and promoters. NPS is used by the world's biggest companies, e.g. Apple or Philips. NPS can be easily calculated using e.g. Niecreplay or SurveySparrow.

Analyze your website in terms of clicks

Tools of this type generate click maps, allow you to study user engagement on a given page (based on scrolling), for both desktop and mobile versions. A great example of this is Hotjar, which also allows you to record user behavior, analyze defined paths to conversion, and analyze surveys and forms.

Landing pages

These are tools used to create landing pages, i.e. usually simple pages which will be displayed after clicking links contained in ads, e-mails, newsletters etc. A well prepared landing page is crucial for the success of a campaign.

Canva

An Internet tool used to create graphic designs. Includes a rich library of templates, graphics, images and fonts. What does this have to do with sales? The appearance of pages and documents plays a large role in the reception of the presented content – the nicer you present your offer, the more likely it is that there will be takers. Although Canva is easy to use, it requires a certain sense of graphic design – because it's easy to overdo it and instead of a beautiful page you get something completely opposite.

Affiliates

In online marketing, affiliation means establishing a voluntary cooperation, from which all parties benefit. So we can say that it is earning on referrals. Creating an affiliate network is therefore extremely important, especially for smaller companies. In creating such relationships it will be helpful e.g. WebePartners.

Summary

The sales process consists of many stages and can consume huge amounts of time and resources. That is why it is worth automating as many of its components as possible, using the benefits of currently available technology.