“When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king.” A lot has changed since the great American retailer John Wanamaker uttered these words in the 1900s. Although brick-and-mortar stores are still an important business channel, the rise of e-commerce has changed how businesses interact with their customers. The fact remains that the customer IS the king.
With diversified channels to make sales and the consequent increase in customer base, businesses can no longer rely on charming their customers through well-trained sales staff. According to Statista, global e-commerce sales will reach 6.3 trillion U.S. dollars in 2024, indicating the significant shift towards online shopping and the importance of digital engagement. That is where customer engagement platforms come into play.
From driving leads and engaging customers to providing you with intelligent insights into customer behavior, a good customer engagement platform can help you make your customer feel like a king. Companies like Gleantap, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Salesforce offer some of the best customer engagement platforms to help your business thrive in 2024.
Gleantap
Gleantap’s customer data & engagement platform provides an all-in-one solution that you will need to hook your customers to your brand. The Omnichannel inbox with AI and the chat widget is excellent for customer support services. It also offers customer engagement through various channels like Facebook, Instagram, SMS, and Email.
With the marketing automation features, you can create highly targeted and effective email and SMS campaigns to help your business grow faster. Sales CRM will take care of the pipeline, automations, and appointments.
Moreover, the platform enables you to survey customers and collect reviews, a crucial element of customer engagement. Following are some of the prominent features Gleantap offers in its customer engagement platform.
Features
Forms & Pages
Gleantap allows you to create customized forms and pages with beautiful templates. It can help you generate leads, collect valuable data, and then use it to make more personalized marketing campaigns.
Customer Journey Pipeline
By keeping all your customer data in one place, Gleantap enables you to track your customer journey. It is a great feature to help you understand your customers more deeply and effectively target them.
Text & Email Marketing
Gleantap ensures multichannel engagement by providing both text & email marketing features. And it takes things one step further by tracking the click & conversion rates and the open rates of the texts and emails sent to the customers.
Segmentation
Not all marketing techniques and engagement methods work the same for every customer. With Gleantap, you can segment your customers based on specific behaviors, profile features, and how they engage with your content. This segmentation allows for more personalized and, thus, effective targeting.
Insights
Gleantap gives you access to important metrics like ROI, lifetime value of customers, visits per customer, churn rate, and more. These insights can help you make more data-driven decisions and increase your growth rate.
AI Content Assistant
Getting insights into your customers and business will only be helpful if you upgrade your content. Gleantap’s AI content assistant lets you do just that. It also helps you develop engaging email subject lines and new campaign ideas. You can also use it to write emails and SMS copy.
Website Text Chat
Gleantap offers a text widget for your website, which is excellent for having two-way conversations with existing and potential customers. If the help desk becomes overwhelmed, you can also automate responses to commonly asked questions so your visitors feel heard.
Email Reputation
Gleantap’s email reputation feature helps you take your customer engagement game to the next level by sending emails when your customer is most engaged, which positively affects the open and click rates of the emails.
Moreover, Gleantap also helps you understand how different email clients perceive your email, thus decreasing the likelihood of your email ending up in the junk or spam folder.
Customer Profiles
Gleantap builds individual profiles of your customers, keeping all the data related to them in one place. The data includes visit history, behavioral patterns, purchase history, profile attributes, payment information, communication history, membership information, contact details, and more.
Pricing
At $299/month/location, Gleantap will give you access to all its features, including Omnichannel inbox with AI, Sales CRM, Marketing Automation, and Review Monitoring. If you need one feature more than the other or want to try out a single thing first, Gleantap offers access to different features separately.
To access the Omnichannel inbox with or without conversational AI, you only have to pay $99/month/location or $49/month/location, respectively. Similarly, you can access Sales CRM, Marketing Automation, and Reviews separately within the same price range.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers some free marketing and sales tools that you can use to get yourself started on your journey to customer engagement. However, if you want a more comprehensive solution to your customer engagement needs, buying the HubSpot CRM Suite will be better.
HubSpot offers different plans for its CRM Suite that you can choose from depending on the size of your business. The most basic plan starts from $30/month, but the number of contacts and paid users allowed are limited compared to the pricier plan, which starts from $5000/month.
It all comes down to your business size and specific needs. The following are some of the features of HubSpot’s CRM Suite that we particularly like.
Features
● The lead management and tracking software included within Hubspot’s customer platform helps you see contact records, communication history, and company records all in one place.
● The live chat software allows businesses to connect with customers in real-time and build a stronger connection. It can positively affect customer engagement.
● The contact database helps you automatically log sale activities and update your contact record.
● The sales pipeline software helps you assign tasks, add new deals, and track progress in your dashboards.
● The team email inbox ensures better coordination and easier management of emails by building a universal inbox.
Pricing
HubSpot offers a starter-level, professional-level, and enterprise-level customer engagement solution. You can get the starter-level CRM suite at $30/month, but you will be allowed to have only 1000 marketing contacts, and only two paid users are allowed for the sales and service hub each.
Upgrading to professional can give you up to 2,000 marketing contacts and five paid sales and service hub users. It is billed at $1781/month, which is a drastic price difference as compared to the starter level, but it offers additional features you cannot access at the starter level.
The enterprise level has a starting price of $5,000/month, and it includes 10,000 marketing contacts and caters to 10 paid users for Sales Hub and Service Hub each.
Active Campaign
Active Campaign’s customer engagement platform offers a CRM that you can use to align day-to-day sales tasks and create marketing campaigns. Marketing automation features help you create a more personalized customer experience by creating targeted campaigns.
Active Campaign also makes account management easier by connecting your email, live chat, and text interactions. It will also level up your email marketing campaigns by pulling data from the customer life cycle for a more personalized experience. Following are some essential features offered by Active Campaign.
Features
● Active Campaign’s automation tools use customer information to figure out what works best for each customer and allow you to set up automations tailored to the needs of different customers based on their behavior and profile attributes.
● The platform uses customer profile data to send automated messages to customers with a much higher degree of personalization than calling them by their names.
● It allows you to set different parameters to segment your customer base. Instead of dividing customers into cohorts, you can select a parameter of your choice and make the targeting more specific.
● Integrating with other tools like Facebook, Salesforce, Calendly, and Shopify allows you to access customer data across multiple platforms and have a more seamless workflow.
Pricing
Active Campaign offers a marketing automation and sales CRM bundle in three plans: Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The plans start at $93, $386, and $734 monthly.
The Enterprise plan includes features like HIPAA support and unlimited email testing, which the less expensive plans do not offer. The number of users also increases with each subsequent plan, and you can customize each plan according to your needs.
SalesForce
SalesForce provides a customer engagement platform named Customer 360. Customer 360 is a whole portfolio of products you can choose from or buy together according to your needs. The products offered by Customer 360 can help you with sales, marketing, customer support, and team coordination.
All these tools can help you create a customer experience that will keep your customers loyal to your brand. Following are the top features Customer 360 offers.
Features
- SalesForce easily allows collaboration between different teams by displaying KPIs in a single view.
- Data cloud allows you to gather data from different sources in a unified platform, which gives you access to unified customer profiles.
- Business insights like identifying high-impact deals let you know where to focus.
- SalesForce allows you to increase customer satisfaction by ensuring engagement and support services through its intelligent chatbot.
- SalesForce uses AI to help you build better and more personalized marketing campaigns for different customers.
- SalesForce also lets you add AI-powered product recommendations for your customers to take their shopping experience to the next level and increase the likelihood of making sales.
Pricing
SalesForce has a CRM suite specifically designed for small businesses to cater to marketing, sales, and service for small teams. The charges are $25/user/month. For large businesses, however, SalesForce sells the marketing automation, sales, and service software separately.
Each solution has starter, professional, and enterprise packages, which you can choose from according to your business needs and affordability. You will have to contact the sales team directly for a more customized solution.
Which Customer Engagement Platform Is Right For You?
Gleantap, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Salesforce are prominent contenders, each offering robust solutions for enhancing customer interactions and fostering business growth.
Gleantap:
Gleantap distinguishes itself with its comprehensive customer data and engagement platform, prioritizing omnichannel interaction and intelligent automation. Its feature-rich suite includes customizable forms & pages, a customer journey pipeline, and AI-driven content assistance, facilitating seamless engagement and effective marketing campaigns. Flexible pricing adds to its appeal, allowing businesses to tailor investments as needed.
HubSpot:
HubSpot, renowned for its CRM Suite, provides free and paid tools to initiate customer engagement efforts. While starter plans offer basic functionalities, professional and enterprise tiers unlock advanced features suited for larger enterprises.
HubSpot excels in lead management, live chat, and sales pipeline management. However, pricing scalability may pose challenges for budget-conscious businesses.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign focuses on leveraging automation and CRM capabilities to deliver personalized experiences and streamline marketing efforts. Its automation tools and robust segmentation options enable tailored interactions based on customer behavior. Integration with popular platforms enhances its utility, though pricing tiers may limit access to advanced features for smaller businesses.
Salesforce:
Salesforce’s Customer 360 boasts a diverse product portfolio aimed at enhancing sales, marketing, and customer support. Noteworthy features include collaboration tools, unified customer profiles, and AI-driven insights. While adaptable to businesses of all sizes, its complex offerings and pricing structure may require significant investment and expertise.
Conclusion
While each platform offers unique strengths, Gleantap stands out for its comprehensive features, user-friendly interface, and flexible pricing. Gleantap empowers businesses to deepen customer connections and drive growth by emphasizing omnichannel engagement, intelligent automation, and actionable insights. Its affordability and scalability further enhance its appeal across enterprises of all sizes.
In conclusion, while the choice depends on specific needs and preferences, Gleantap emerges as a versatile and effective solution for businesses aiming to elevate their customer engagement strategies in 2024.