Increase Marketing Engagement Rates with maaiiconnect. A Guide to Web Links & QR Codes for Call/Chat
Video killed the radio star, DVD killed the video star, and now streaming is Queen above all. It’s easy to ignore our favourite channels when a newer and better one comes along. Likewise, email marketing has given way to SMS and now Instant Messengers in terms of engagement, such as open rates, read rates, and click through rates. But that doesn’t mean everyone has given up on it — the number of marketing emails sent is still rising year-on-year.
In order to stand-out in a crowded inbox, businesses need to step up their use of new technology on our favourite “traditional” channels to push up engagement rates instead of chasing new channels, some of which turn out just to be short-lived fads.
Vine, Google Plus, iTunes Ping anyone?
How to increase marketing engagement rates on the channels that you already use?
maaiiconnect is an all-in-one customer engagement and communications platform that centralises all of your communication channels and staff together. 2 unique tools from maaiiconnect are web links and QR codes for call & chat, and both offer strong growth opportunities for brands to increase engagement rates, improve customer experiences, and convert more sales.
What are web links for call & chat?
Many of us may be familiar with “web links” when we click a hyperlinked phone number on Google which then opens the number in your phone’s call app. The call would be made via your phone provider’s call minutes — this can be a problem if you’re travelling or calling an overseas number. It’s also pointless from a desktop, and most businesses don’t have the HTML coding expertise to make phone numbers clickable on their web sites or in emails — creating bottlenecks for customers who need to manually type in the numbers on a different app. It’s also bad user experience.
With maaiiconnect, we provide web links that can connect customers directly to an individual staff, or a group of staff — and you don’t need to show any phone number for privacy/security concerns. These web links can start a call or chat (through the maaiiconnect web communication widget, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger) — or even launch a maaiiconnect video call. Now your staff are reachable worldwide via both desktop and mobile, on internet and phone data connections. A cost effective solution for international communication, with no HTML coding needed — just copy and paste the link.
What are QR codes for call & chat?
QR codes work the same way as web links — except that your customers can scan the QR code to launch the call or chat. While web links can be used anywhere online, QR codes are excellent for all offline materials such as posters, booklets, product packaging, name cards, and more.
Email Marketing
Campaign Monitor hails a successful email marketing campaign as having an open rate of 15–25% and click through rate of 2.5% — not bad if you want to share a simple message with your audience, but if you’re looking for purchases, orders, or traffic to your website — is it good enough?
According to a survey by maaiiconnect, part of the decline in email marketing engagement rates is due to preference for chatting with brands in the same way we chat with our friends, family, and colleagues — with 87% of people choosing to use social media and instant messaging to talk to businesses.
Leveraging maaiiconnect web links is a strategic way to convert EDMs to a call or chat and boost engagement rates. Customers can instantly order or start an enquiry in 1 click — an alternative to phone numbers that’s not only smarter looking, but a better user experience.
Make sure to set up smart routing to help funnel the enquiries to the right person, at the right time, with the right language.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads remain a great way to reach mass or highly targeted audiences, but while costs are going up, RoI has been suffering. To combat this, many marketers have been connecting Facebook ads to Messenger as it sees a 30% higher RoI. However, not all customers want to talk with brands on Messenger due to privacy and a desire to only have friends in their chat list. Businesses also found that the increase in Messenger chats for conversational marketing campaigns was difficult to handle and allocate quality manpower hours for.
Inserting maaiiconnect web links to the Facebook ad as an alternative to Messenger enables businesses to access more comprehensive insights and analytics about the campaign, and most importantly track if the customer has communicated with them on other channels — such as WhatsApp or live chat.
Alternatively, if businesses prefer to use Messenger, it’s made even easier with maaiiconnect by centralising all omnichannel communication on to one dashboard. Answering messages from the campaign is streamlined as staff don’t need to keep changing between platforms when engaging customers, and can easily transfer chats to the best staff to support complex enquiries.
Offline Advertising
Offline remains a very important aspect of any integrated marketing effort. Including newspapers in ad campaigns has proven to increase the effectiveness of the campaign — with a 5.7x increase in the finance sector, 2.8x increase in the retail sector, 1.7x increase in the automotive industry, and 3x increase in the travel sector.
maaiiconnect QR codes ensure easier conversion from offline to online orders, and enable marketers to finally track offline ad effectiveness by measuring the enquiry volume and sales conversion directly from each ad. Rather than calculating the RoI through guesstimates, utilise solid data from maaiiconnect to measure your return. Customers on the other hand, can immediately scan the QR code to start a chat or call with a streamlined O2O experience.
Top 5 ways our customers use QR codes to increase marketing engagement
- On street signage for restaurant bookings
- At exhibitions to enable guests to freely connect with exhibitor sales teams, with no connectivity restrictions
- In booklets and flyers so readers can easily get in touch with experts or speakers
- On billboards where customers often make snap decisions to purchase and want to do so as quickly as possible
- On product packaging so customers can easily scan and start a call with customer service — and turn on video calls for technical demos or troubleshooting
SMS
SMS have an incredibly high open rate of 98% and response rate 209% higher than other channels. Businesses have been heavily focused on using SMS for appointment reminders and confirmations, but often need to send multiple SMS due to character limits and various touchpoints needed for each customer — eg; enquiry link, appointment link (such as video call), update link, web site etc. This often means that businesses sending at least send at least 2–3 SMS to 1 customer for a single appointment.
Halve the cost and improve customer experience with maaiiconnect web links.
A 1-click, 1 link solution, customers can start an enquiry, change a booking, or launch the video consultation all through the same web link. Save the character limit for a quality message, and reduce the number of SMS sent to customers.
maaiiconnect’s SMS campaigns can be designed and sent worldwide to 160 markets in seconds, save your favourite templates for use in the next campaign!
Email Signatures & Business Cards
Modernise your email signatures and business cards. Add web links to email signatures as an easy 1-click contact method — a more secure alternative to including phone numbers, WhatsApp, WeChat and other channels, especially for sales teams.
After clicking on a web link or scanning a QR code, a virtual business card opens where customers can see your photo, title, and email — digitally transforming traditional business cards.
Top tip: To make a soft copy of your name card, take a screen shot of the virtual name card and you can send it directly as a web link with a preview straight from your phone album! *Depending on your phone make and version
Customer Identity and Intelligence
Know your customer so you can serve them better. No matter what touchpoint your customers come through, with maaiiconnect you can see full communication context and history. Whether they scanned a QR code on a flyer promoting sneakers, started a call from an email about high heels, or sent a Facebook message about boots — know what they’ve asked in the past and see crucial data such as their location, device/browser language, device type, and more so you can hit the ground running with great service every time.
Privacy and Security
Never hand out your phone number or email again if you don’t want to. Don’t risk them being leaked online by using web links and QR codes as a secure alternative. With unique web links and QR codes for all of your staff they can be reached anywhere in the world via an internet connection. Quality is guaranteed with a 99.95% Service Level Agreement (SLA), and 24/7 customer support.
All communication is encrypted with the latest standards, and protected with advanced security and password policies. maaiiconnect will never sell your personal data like most major email and social media providers.
maaiiconnect is available worldwide.
Reports and Insights — Capture, Track, and Measure Every Touchpoint
With all of your communication channels centralised on one platform, reviewing and analysing data has never been easier. Access comprehensive Reports & Insights for all of your omnichannel communication through maaiiconnect instead of jumping between dozens of different platforms like your email provider, Facebook, SMS service etc. See traffic and enquiry volume for each and every web link, QR code and other channels, to help review and strategise to increase marketing engagement rates even more. Gone are the days of manually downloading or screenshotting reports from 10+ different channels and platforms!
So how do you plan to increase marketing engagement rates? Let us know in the comments.
This article was originally published in the maaiiconnect blog, by Peter Jobson.
