1. Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM

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14 décembre 2022/par Service comm.

20 Best AI Writing Apps

Content production using Surfer SEO Integration

Artificial intelligence is the latest buzzword in the tech world. It’s everywhere and has been for a while, but AI-powered writing software is a relatively new concept.

AI Writing Software uses artificial intelligence to write articles, blog posts, and other content in your voice. The goal is to provide a tool that will save you time and energy so you can focus on different aspects of your business or life.

To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of 20 AI writing software you can use to create content for your website, blog, or social media accounts.

1. Copy.ai

Copy.ai uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to produce high-quality content for your business, ebooks, blog posts, articles, product descriptions, social media content, and more. It can also be used to rewrite existing content so that you can use it on your website, blog, or social media pages.

Since it uses artificial intelligence to mimic human writing patterns and styles, the copy will be more natural and easier to read than the typical machine-generated text we’re used to seeing.

Copy.ai differs from traditional content creation tools because it doesn’t just offer suggestions on improving your current content; it generates new text based on what it thinks would be most relevant for the topic or audience.

Key Features:

Pre-built Templates – Copy.ai has a ton of pre-built templates for different kinds of content. For example, you can see below that it has options for blogs, social media content, video, case studies, and more:

Different tones and variations – Get access to tones like friendly, persuasive, professional, luxury, witty, bold, and more to align the content with your writing style. It also creates multiple variations based on your input – you can pick the one you like or make more.

To illustrate this, here’s a screenshot of the results we got while trying to write the introduction for this article using Copy AI.

Writing and Brainstorming tools – You also get tons of writing tools, brainstorming tools, and personal tools. Writing tools include essay intro, cliffhanger generator, adjective accelerator, passive to active voice, verb booster, and the like. Brainstorming tools have a name generator, startup ideas, viral ideas, and more – while Personal tools include birthday cards, clubhouse bios, cover letters, love letters, and shower thoughts.

You can save your content and then return to it later if you wish. Plus, the software’s user interface is easy to navigate, and the program is simple.

Luciano Viterale, Co-founder of Ticker Nerd, also shares his experience with Copy.ai,

“I’ve been experimenting with AI copywriting tools since GPT-3 was released. I have explored many of the popular tools. However, my favorite tool by far is Copy AI. They have an outstanding blogging outline feature; the UX is clean and easy to navigate, and the pricing is reasonable.

Copy AI also generated the name of my startup, “Ticker Nerd,” which is an investing newsletter that was recently acquired.”

That said, Viterale suggests that the blog outlines can be repetitive. He says, “one thing I don’t particularly like is that blog outlines include the same point repeatedly but articulated slightly differently, essentially adding no value.”

Pros:

Copy.ai produces content at least 80% as good as a human writer (and often better). The system continually learns, which means the more you use it, the better it gets.
It has an extensive library of templates available for different requirements.
It supports over 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, and more.

Cons:

Not suitable for long-form content.
The content can get a bit repetitive after a while.
The free plan lets you create only 2000 words per month.

Pricing:

It starts from $39 per month (if you pay yearly) for up to 40k words per month, unlimited copywriting tools, priority email support, Blog Wizard tool, support for 25+ languages, and five user seats.

2. Jasper

Jasper.ai is an AI copywriting tool that uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to create content based on user input.

It helps you generate original content for your blogs, social media, websites, and more. Jasper also knows 10% of what’s on the internet and continues to learn more daily.

Just like Copy.ai, Jasper’s user interface is easy to use and navigate around. With its specific template for blog posts, articles, ebooks, and more, it’s also one of the few AI writing software suitable for long-form content.

All you have to do is enter the title, your intended audience, tone of voice, and language options, along with the main point of your copy, and voila – Jasper can churn out a high-quality piece of content for you within seconds.

(Jasper Interface)

Key Features:

50+ AI templates – Jasper.ai offers a variety of AI templates, including Blog Posts, Summary, Conclusion, Q&A, Ads, Videos, Social Media, Rewriter, Marketing Frameworks, Articles, and more. Each template has several use cases – for example, a blog has Blog Titles, Content Briefs, and Outlines.

Headline Generator

Boss Mode lets you write long-form content such as blog posts, stories, and books. It also allows you to organize your content into projects and find help with priority chat support, Grammarly integration, and plagiarism checks. You can also choose from 25 languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and more.
SurferSEO Integration – If you have a Boss Mode plan, you can add SurferSEO to your Jasper account. This integration will enable you to find the best keywords, build a content strategy, create blog outlines, and more.

Pros:

No technical assistance is required.
Simple, easy-to-use interface.
Provides plagiarism-free content every time.
It helps you build a content strategy based on high-ranking topics and keywords.
Ready-to-use templates cover most of the use cases that a writer or marketer will need.
Excellent customer support is provided through live training sessions, live Q&A sessions, blogs, Facebook community, help docs, and emails.

Cons:

Plagiarism-free content doesn’t always mean unique content.
Customer support options via chat or email are limited.

Pricing:

It starts with $40/mo for 35K words, 50+ AI templates, 20+ languages, up to 5 seats, and chat support.

3. Rytr

Rytr is a content generation tool that uses AI to generate high-quality, human-sounding content for emails, blogs, YouTube videos, and landing pages.

It also supports multiple languages and tones and uses copywriting frameworks, including AIDA & PAS. And to ensure that your content is free of plagiarism, it comes with a built-in plagiarism checker.

Like Copy.ai. Rytr is also more suitable for short-form content and copywriting than long-form content.

Key Features:

30+ languages – Rytr supports many languages, including English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Polish. It also uses a proprietary approach to support languages that are not supported by the limitations of GPT3.

Language Support

Use Cases: Rytr offers 40+ use cases, including Blog Section Writing, Blog Ideas & Outline, Brand Name, Business Idea Pitches, Call-to-action, Cover letters, Emails, and more.

Each use case has a short description of what it’s about below it. Select the use case to write about, give a little context about what you want to write, and then select how many variants you want the AI to write for you (max is 3).

You can also choose a creativity level by selecting one of 6 options, including Default, Non, Low, Medium, High, or Max.

Generating Blog Ideas & Outlines

Tone – You can add a personal touch to your content by choosing from over 18 tones, including Formal, Convincing, Inspirational, and more.

Writing in a formal tone.

Pros:

Simple user interface.
Fast live chat support.
Using the magic command, you can produce content for poems, letters, and more.
Comes with an in-built tool for plagiarism checks.
Provides multiple resources for guidance.

Cons:

Tone options are limited.
You will receive a small number of credits per month.

Pricing:

It starts at $9/month for 100K characters per month. There is also a free plan with a 10K characters limit.

4. Writesonic

Writesonic is a content-creation platform that uses generative artificial intelligence models to write SEO-optimized long-form blogs and articles.

It has 65+ use cases or templates, including Article Writer 3.0, Landing Pages, Tweets, Quora Answers, Facebook Ads, and more.

You can easily create desired content by picking a suitable use case, typing a topic, and adding a paragraph of your own words. You can also set the language and quality level before generating it.

Generating Pros and Cons

Key Features:

24 Languages: You can produce content in 24 languages, including English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, Czech, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, and more. They’re also continually adding more language options.

Languages

Unconventional Use Cases: It’s got a more comprehensive range of templates, including Sentence Expander, Text Summary, Conclusion Writer, YouTube Outlines, LinkedIn Ad Descriptions, Analogy Maker, Question Generator, Song Lyrics, Definition, and more.

SEMrush and WordPress Integrations: Writesonic integrates with SEMrush, Zapier, and WordPress.org. SEMrush helps you optimize your content for search engines, and WordPress.org lets you publish your blog directly from Writesonic. Zapier integration enables you to automate your content from Writesonic.

SEMrush Integration

Pros:

Easy to use.
The User Interface gives you step-by-step instructions and tips for how to use the tool more efficiently.
There are many unique use cases, including a hook generator, pros and cons generator, and landing page creator.
Free trial available.

Cons:

Like other tools on this list, the copy may not always be accurate.

Pricing:

It starts at $10/month for 12K words, 70+ AI templates, a Landing page generator, a browser extension, Zapier integration, and more.

5. Grammarly Business

Like most other tools on this list, Grammarly Business isn’t an AI-based content writer per se—it’s more like an AI-based writing assistant. Specifically, it checks your documents for grammar, spelling, plagiarism, and style mistakes.

Grammarly Business also provides feedback on your writing style so that you can improve as a writer over time.

You can use Grammarly Business to:

Get suggestions to improve your writing style, including word choice and sentence structure.
Identify common grammatical mistakes and fix them in one click.
Improve your email response time by checking emails before they’re sent out.

It’s also ideal for larger teams of writers who need to access the same Grammarly accounts, enabling multiple users to edit documents simultaneously.

One of the best parts about this tool is that it integrates with every online writing space, including Google Docs. This allows you to write and edit simultaneously without waiting for one draft to be finished before making changes to the next.

Key Features:

Custom Brand Tone: You can create multiple tone profiles to suit your needs and assign them to different Teams. You’ll also get real-time feedback on your tone and can adjust it while writing. Your tone can be anything from Joyful, Excited, Loving, and Surprised to Curious, Formal, and Cautionary.

Brand Tone Feedback

Grammar Checker: Grammarly gives you feedback on everything that can be improved in your writing – from typos to sentence structure. It also checks for grammar mistakes, spelling errors, and incorrect punctuation.

Style Guide: Grammarly Style Guide enables you to establish a uniform tone and style across all your teams. You can set a library of words, terms, and phrases that your teams should adhere to.

You can also prevent them from using complex acronyms or jargon. Lastly, you can get feedback on how the performance has increased with the Style Guide.

Style Guide Analytics

Pros:

Real-time feedback on errors and tone usage.
Grammarly gives instant, easy-to-understand feedback and lets you fix mistakes with just one click.
You can always add new words to the dictionary.

Cons:

It flags passive voice as an error.
Grammarly is good at catching mistakes, but sometimes it corrects things unnecessarily.

Pricing:

It starts at $15/month for one member, real-time feedback, style guide, snippets, brand tones, admin controls, and more.

6. Peppertype.ai

Peppertype.ai is another AI-based content generation tool that claims to create content ten times faster, boost Google ranking, and optimize conversions.

It’s a simple but valuable tool for writers who need help getting started on their next article, email, or blog post.

Some of its use cases include a product review generator, Amazon product descriptions, personal bio, email subject lines, cold emails, paragraph writing, Google Ad copy, Meta descriptions, blog outlines, blog conclusion, and more.

Key Features:

Projects: You can organize your content under Projects, which will group similar types of content so that you have an easier time finding and repurposing the content.

Projects

Output personalization: You can like or dislike the output so that the AI behind it can learn your preferences and improve its performance.

Personalizing output

Pros:

If you invite your friends to use Peppertype.ai, join our community, write them a review, and schedule a training call, they’ll reward you with more word credits.
You can create teams, projects, and workspaces.
You can filter out unwanted results with annotations.

Cons:

One seat is expensive, and the price increases with each added seat.

Pricing:

It starts at $35/month for one user, 50K words, 40+ use cases, unlimited projects, customer support, and more.

7. Anyword

Anyword is a copywriting AI that creates content tailored for your customers and target audiences.

It has a unique feature – the predictive performance score to predict how well your copy will perform and engage with your audience. This helps you write optimized texts that boost your conversions.

It has 11 major use cases, including a social post generator, Instagram caption generator, sentence rewriter, AI writer tool, meta description generator, Ad copy, landing page, blog, and more.

Generating Facebook Post

Although it can create blog post titles and outlines, it’s better suited for writing short-form content like ad copy, product descriptions, and headlines. When writing a blog post, it can generate the title, outline, and introduction before creating body paragraphs.

Key Features:

Predictive Performance Score: This score is given to your copy based on its potential to perform well with your target audience. This can help you immediately improve your copy.

Predictive Performance Score

Website Triggered Messages: This feature helps you create and deploy multiple copy variations on your website and apply the best one automatically.

Pros:

It offers a predictive performance score to optimize your copy beforehand.
It also offers a free social post generator. No sign-up is required.
It automatically creates and runs multiple copy variations to determine the best one.
A Freemium plan is available.

Cons:

Limited use cases.
A bit expensive for the credits and the number of use cases it offers.

Pricing:

It costs $24/month for 20K words and one seat.

8. Scalenut

Scalenut uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to produce content that ranks higher on search results. It also gives insights into statistics such as word count, grade level, H tags, readability, and the number of images you should use in your content piece.

Aside from that, it offers a variety of use cases, including SEO Hub, AI Copywriter, Talent Network, Chrome Extension, Cruise Mode, and more. With these features, you can create content for blog ideas, product descriptions, website copies, blog intros, and more.

Key Features:

Integrations: You can integrate Scalenut with SEMrush for keyword research, cluster boost, and Copyscape to check plagiarism.

App integrations

Cruise Mode: Cruise Mode helps you create blog content in 5 minutes. You just need to provide your blog post’s title, outline, and main points to get your intended content. You’ll also get a real-time quality score that helps you improve your search ranking.

Pros:

It offers a quality score.
Affordable plans with a 7-day free trial.
24*7 chat & email support.

Cons:

Limited use cases and features.
Content quality is not consistent for all businesses.

Pricing:

It starts at $12/month for 100K AI words, 5 SEO reports, 24*7 chat and email support, and more.

9. Frase.io

Frase.io is an all-in-one AI writing tool that helps you, research competitors, develop content briefs, and produce and optimize content.

First, you’ll analyze your search competitors using Frase so you can see what your competition is writing about. Next, you can focus on Then, your overall outline or dig deeper by focusing on individual headlines, external links, statistics, etc.

Next, use Frase’s AI writer to finish your draft. You can choose from dozens of use cases to generate content, including product descriptions, blog introductions, and more. You can even automatically expand on what you’re currently writing or rewrite what you’ve already written.

Finally, you can optimize your draft using recommended keywords and readability scores. Again, Frase provides real-time feedback as you fill in the gaps.

Key Features:

AI Writing Tools: They include an AI content generator, introduction generator, outline generator, paraphrasing tool, paragraph rewriter, blog title generator, meta description generator, product description generator, slogan generator, summary generator, sentence rewriter, and more.

Blog introduction generator

Content Analytics: It fetches data from Google Search Console to provide insights into organic growth, content decay, and keyword opportunities.

Frase Content Analytics

Integrations: It integrates with Google Docs, Google Search Console, and WordPress. It also offers a Chrome extension.

Frase Integrations

Pros:

You can add multiple pages in a single doc.
It offers content analytics, allowing you to see which articles are getting the most traction and which ones are not.
It enables you to do competitors’ research.

Cons:

Limited word credits in each plan.
Max 3 seats available.

Pricing:

It starts at $14.99/month for one user, 20K AI characters, and four articles (write/optimize) per month. There’s also a 5-day free trial for $1.

10. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is an SEO tool and AI writing assistance that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to help you manage and improve your content strategy.

Rather than creating the body of your copy, it helps you create outlines and optimize the content you write based on that outline.

It helps you to evaluate your content and find places to improve it using its content score metric, competitor research, SERP analyzer, and keyword recommendations. It also offers a content planner that you can share with your team.

Key Features:

Outline Builder for Content Editor: The tool generates headlines and paragraphs based on your competitors’ postings. You can use that content as is or edit it by copy-pasting it into the editor. Content paragraphs are available in English, German, French, Polish, Swedish, and Dutch.

Outline Builder Content Builder

SEO Audit Tool: This tool performs step-by-step optimization on your website to improve your Google search results. When you pick an URL to audit, it provides suggestions such as missing backlinks, internal links, word count, and important keywords to use.

Terms to use

Content Planner: You can start with your content planner by keyword or domain. Based on your keywords, it comes up with clusters that you can use to create your content topics.

However, there is a learning curve involved. You will need to understand topic clusters, search intent, and keyword difficulty, among other metrics.

Content Planner

Pros:

Easy to use interface.
They offer a 7-day money-back guarantee – if you don’t find it helpful, you get your money back.
It identifies keyword stuffing and prevents you from doing so.

Cons:

Each plan offers a limited number of pages that you can audit.

Pricing:

It starts at $49/month for one website tracking and ten articles/month.

11. Copysmith

Copysmith markets itself as an AI content creation solution for teams.

This AI writer is best suited for bulk and short-form content copy like product descriptions, blog templates, social media content, advertising content, and more.

Key Features:

Use cases: It includes product descriptions, content enhancement, ads & social media, blog templates, and brainstorming. With Product descriptions, you can generate descriptions for eCommerce Products, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Flipkart. Blog templates include blog titles, blog ideas, outlines, intro, Kickstarter, and more.

Product Description

Campaign Builder: It includes several AI templates to help you generate SEO-optimized product descriptions, Facebook posts, and Google ads in just a few seconds.

Integrations: Copysmith integrates with Frase to use SEO data, Google Ads to publish campaigns, Microsoft Word to produce content, and WooCommerce for products.

Pros:

It’s easy to use and generates SEO-optimized content.
It comes with an in-built plagiarism checker.
Provides good training material for new users.

Cons:

Not suitable for long-form content.

Pricing:

It starts at $19/month for 75 credits, up to 40K words, and up to 20 plagiarism checks.

12. ClosersCopy

ClosersCopy is an AI writing robot that provides various templates for producing marketing materials, including website content, sales copy, email marketing campaigns, and social media posts. This tool doesn’t require any special skills or training to create engaging text.

Key Features:

Use cases: It includes Facebook & Google Ads, email subject lines, landing pages, sales copies, social media content, and more.
LongForm editor: You can create blog posts, articles, sales copies, and email marketing copies.
Drag-and-drop builders: The drag-and-drop content builder makes your tasks more manageable by allowing you to drag and drop elements on your copy. The only thing you need to do is provide some context at the time of configuring this builder.

Pros:

Its user interface is easy to use and navigate.
You can easily create content with their drag-and-drop builder.
The video tutorials provide in-depth, step-by-step instructions for each process.
Tone analysis helps you understand the emotions in your writing.

Cons:

No free plan or trial period is available.
More expensive than most other AI tools.

Pricing:

It starts at $49.99/month for two seats, 300 AI runs, 50 SEO Audits, an SEO planner, Email support, and more.

13. LongShot AI

LongShot AI is another writing tool that can help you write SEO-friendly content. It comes with over 30 use cases and a plagiarism checker to ensure your content is original.

While most of its use cases are for short-form content, you can use templates like the content expander, write more, or bullets to text generator to assist you with your long-form piece.

Key Features:

Use Cases: It includes content rephrasing, FAQ generator, headline generator, blog ideas generator, meta description generator, text extender, blog insights creator, headline intro generator, product description generator, FAB copywriting framework generator, content readability improver, sales email generator, video description generator, and more.

Headline Generator

Integrations: It integrates with WordPress to enable you to export AI-generated copies directly to WordPress. Its integration with SEMrush will help you write SEO-friendly content. Apart from these, LongShot AI will also provide integration with Hubspot and Grammarly soon.

LongShot X SEMrush

LongShot AI Community: The LongShot AI Community is a group of researchers and developers working on open artificial intelligence problems. Anyone can join and contribute to the research.

Pros:

The free forever plan offers ten credits daily.
Community is a big help for new users.
It gives you multiple ways to know more about the product, including blog posts, help videos, customer support, and announcements.

Cons:

Aside from the free plan, it’s costly, especially considering the limited number of use cases and credits.
Doesn’t have use cases for social media content.
Supports only eight languages.

Pricing:

It starts at $49/month for 1000 monthly credits, one user, basic integrations, and more.

14. INK Editor

Inky is a suite of content marketing tools that include AI-powered tools: AI Writer, SEO Optimizer, Copy Assistant, and Content Planner. These features can be used individually or collectively, and the price will be adjusted accordingly.

The AI Writer offers unlimited credits and helps you write long-form and short-form content. In addition, you can re-edit the generated copy with a single click as often as you want. The tool also offers WordPress plugin integration and open-source export API.

In addition, you get access to use cases like product descriptions, social media copies, sales copies, blogs, essays, emails, microcopies, product ideas, and more.

AI Writing Tools

Key Features:

SEO Optimizer: INK’s SEO Optimizer is a natural language optimization tool that can improve your SEO score and increase engagement by providing recommendations on keywords, titles, alt text, and the like. Enter a keyword or phrase, and the INK SEO Optimizer will do the rest.

SEO Optimization Score

Content Planner: The INK Content Planner helps you group keywords and analyze search intent. You can also import your keywords and download your clusters for further analysis.

Copy Assistant: A built-in grammar checker automatically checks your grammar and spelling. It also checks words, tone, and sentence fragments.

Pros:

Easy to use.
You can use it as an all-in-one content marketing tool.
Offers unlimited AI text writing even on a free plan.
Offers keyword clusters to optimize your SEO strategy.

Cons:

The paid plan is relatively costly for one seat.

Pricing:

It starts at $50/month for one seat, INK Copy Assistant PRO, INK AI Writer PRO, INK SEO Optimizer PRO, and INK Content Planner PRO with 1,000 Keywords.

15. Articoolo

Articoolo is an AI content generator developed by a group of mathematicians, computer scientists, content writers, and marketing specialists. Thanks to NLP and AI technology, the tool drafts articles in a way that mimics the human brain.

Key Features:

Use Cases: It includes Text Writer, Article Rewriter, Article Summarizer, and Image Scraper. Based on your keyword, Articoolo will also fetch images from royalty-free websites.
WordPress Plugin: This will help you export your copies directly to WordPress so you can post faster.
Plagiarism Checker: All you have to do is enter your text into the program, and it will scan for instances of plagiarism.

Pros:

It has pay-per-use plans.

Cons:

There’s no official website.
Customer support is missing the mark.
Not much information about the tool online.

Pricing:

It starts at $19/month for a ten-article fixed package.

16. NeuralText

NeuralText is a writing tool that offers users keyword reports and cluster credits. It also has an API for developers looking to integrate its services into other programs.

Some of its most prominent use cases include a paragraph generator, content outline, and product description – making it a short-form content-centric tool.

The best part is that it not only creates content but also creates content briefs and optimizes the content based on keywords and SERP analysis.

Key Features:

AI Writing Assistant: This tool will help you produce text in any format. It also provides text recommendations while you write.

AI Writing Assistant

Content Optimization: NeuralText can help make your content more search engine-friendly and improve its score in Google’s search results. It analyzes your word choice and sentence structure to ensure your content is easy to scan and relevant to your topic.

Content Score

Content research analysis: It makes content research and studies more accessible, allowing you to see real-time data across SERPs. It also has a Google Docs-style editor, making managing your data points and keeping track of your research effortless.

Content research analysis

Pros:

Free plan available.
Offers keyword clusters.
You can group content into different projects.

Cons:

The community is not active.
A bit on the expensive side.

Pricing:

It starts at $49/month for one user, unlimited AI text generation, 50 content analyses, and 50 keyword reports.

17. AI Writer

AI Writer helps you create unique, SEO-friendly content that you can publish directly to WordPress. In addition, it offers features like research & write, text rewording, verifiable citations, and source summarizer.

Key Features:

AI-Writer Content Kit: AI Writer uses artificial intelligence to analyze keyword difficulty and ranking opportunities based on the field you enter. It chooses up to 250 keywords and generates one article per keyword, which can be directly published to WordPress.

(Sub)Topic Discoverer: It checks to see what other writers have written about and then uses that information to create new topics for you.

Verifiable Citations: When it produces content for you, it also provides a list of citations so that you can check the accuracy of the information.

Pros:

It offers a free trial for seven days.
One of the few AI writing tools to offer verifiable citations so you can confirm the accuracy of the content.

Cons:

Not enough resources in the knowledge base for new users.
Fewer use cases.
Does not offer a free version.

Pricing:

It starts at $29/month for one user and up to 40 articles.

18. Wordtune

Wordtune makes your previously written content clearer, more compelling, and more authentic by bringing out the best.

Although this tool doesn’t write content from scratch, it makes your content look more professional. It also integrates with Microsoft Word, so you can edit your work while you write your content.

It provides tools to:

Rewrite your content
Make your content casual
Make your content formal
Shorten your sentences to make them crisp
Expand your sentences to give more detail

Key Features:

Paragraph Rewriter: Wordtune can rewrite your paragraphs entirely at once, one sentence at a time, and one word at a time. See below for an example.

Paragraph Rewriter

Tone: You can alter how your content appears by making it more informal or formal. Here’s an example:

Casual Tone

Pros:

You can make the text longer or shorter.
It offers a casual and formal tone.
Simple and easy-to-use interface.

Cons:

It doesn’t offer any other benefits besides rewriting.

Pricing:

It starts at $9.99/month for unlimited rewrites.

19. ProWritingAid

Rather than a full-fledged artificial intelligence writer, ProWritingAid is a grammar checker and style editor that’s available online. It helps prevent spelling errors, suggests impactful words, and corrects grammar and punctuation.

It supports general English, British English, US English, Australian English, and Canadian English.

Key Features:

Document type: You can choose from 35+ document types for your content. They include general academic abstract, academic essays, admission letters, book reviews, business books, and more.

Reports: ProWritingAid provides three types of reports: real-time reports, summary reports, and style reports.

Real-time reports show errors and corrections as you write. Summary reports provide an overview of all reports. It contains a spelling score, grammar score, and style score. On the other hand, Style reports identify problems in writing style and readability.

Summary report

Pros:

It offers 20+ reports to track your progress as you improve your writing.
There are no limits on the number of words you can use with premium plans.
Notifies of style changes and suggests corrections if needed.

Cons:

Only available through the web browser.

Pricing:

It starts at $20 per month or $120 per year (if you pay yearly).

20. Article Forge

Once you provide ArticleForge.com with a keyword, article length, and other custom information, the program creates a 1500+ word article in seconds.

Your content will be checked for plagiarism and uniqueness before being delivered.

Key Features:

Media-rich content: It can automatically find and insert relevant images, videos, titles, and links in your articles. To make it more relevant, ArticleForge also uses LSI keywords.

Creating an article

SEO Automation: It integrates with WordPress to automate your scheduling and posting of articles.

WordPress Integration

Interlinking: It can automatically turn URLs into links within your article. You can choose how often to do this for every keyword or just the first occurrence.

Languages: It can generate content in English, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.

Pros:

Produces SEO-optimized content.
Can schedule posts on WordPress automatically.
Plagiarism-free content.
Automatic keyword linking.

Cons:

The content can be repetitive.
You need to check the accuracy of the content before publishing.

Pricing:

It starts at $13/month for 25K words and the rest of the features.

Frequently asked questions about AI writing software.

1. What is AI Writing Software?

AI writing software is an artificial intelligence program used to write text. It can generate content for websites, blogs, and other fields. The content created by AI writers is often indistinguishable from human-created content. Still, sometimes it has a slightly robotic feel or may include words or phrases that seem out of place in the context of the writing.

2. How does AI Writing Software work?

The software uses an algorithm to mimic the creative process of human writers. It first creates a base text that modifies by adding words and phrases specific to your content. This ensures that you get high-quality original content every time you use it.

3. Who can use AI Writing Software?

Anyone who needs to create texts for their business or website can benefit from using this software. It’s also an excellent option for freelance writers and content marketers facing writer’s block. As it’s easy and fast, even beginners can start using it immediately and see great results within minutes!

4. Can I use AI writers for everything I write?

No — AI writers are best suited for shorter pieces like headlines or product descriptions because they don’t have much time to learn about your company’s brand voice or personality.

While there are tools to churn out long-form content, you still need the human touch for longer and more research-intensive pieces like blog posts or sales copy. AI algorithms still can’t pick up on nuances like a human can.

5. What are some of the benefits of using AI Writing Software?

There are many benefits to using AI writing software. The most obvious benefit is that you no longer need to spend time creating content yourself. The software will do it for you!

Another benefit is that AI writing software allows you to create content in any niche or topic you desire. You can even target multiple niches at once! This makes it possible to scale your business quickly and easily by leveraging the power of automation while still keeping your hands on the work itself.

6. How much does it cost?

The pricing depends on the type of service you want to use. Some companies offer free trials or even freemium versions with limited credits so that you can test their services before making a purchase decision. Some companies offer lifetime discounts for repeat customers, so keep an eye out for those offers when making your choice!

7. What’s the difference between AI-powered and human-written content?

While humans are still required for high-quality content creation, AI makes scaling up your content marketing efforts easier. By automating much of the writing process – from keyword research to formatting – AI can help you create more content at a lower cost per article. In addition, this frees your team members to focus on other tasks that require their expertise (like outreach) or simply spend more time enjoying their lives!

8. What is the best AI Writer?

The best AI writer depends on what you want it to do and how much you want to spend. If you’re going to write books or articles, many different programs can help you with this task. Our top pick for long-form would be Jasper.

On the other hand, if you only need help with short-form content such as blog posts or press releases, there may not be any need for an AI writer because these documents don’t require as much work or effort from the user. In that case, you might want to use tools like Copy.ai, Rytr, and more.

9. Can I use AI Writing Software to replace my human writers?

No, AI writing software isn’t meant to replace human writers. It’s designed to work alongside them, helping them create more engaging and relevant content for their audiences. You’ll still need human writers who can add style and personality to your content.

Over to You!

Do you find writing to be an exhausting activity? If yes, you would want to try one of the AI Writing Software tools we suggested above. These are some of the best AI writing tools specially developed to boost creativity, motivation, and productivity.

There’s room for experimentation with AI-generated content as long as you can recognize where specific tools are lacking and how to incorporate that into your work. Ultimately, the future of AI writing assistant software will mean ever-more versatile tools for writers, so don’t be shy about testing the waters.

Featured image by pch.vector on Freepik.

The post 20 Best AI Writing Apps first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

14 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

10 Best Website Builders for 2023

When you need a website, you have two options, you can hire someone who’s an expert in website building to design it for you, or you can make it yourself.

Hiring someone with experience building a website means you’ll get a more professional result, and you should achieve a good return on your investment. However, hiring a freelancer or a design agency has plenty of pitfalls. Budgets can spiral, timescales get stretched, and the end result might not meet your expectations.

The answer might be to build your own website using a website builder. And the best site builders are designed to help you do just that — most don’t require any design or coding knowledge.

Creating a website with a website builder is usually cheaper than outsourcing the job, and the results can be almost as good as a bespoke website. There are even some free website builders out there.

The key is to choose the right website builder that ticks all your boxes and delivers what you want without paying through the nose for bells and whistles you don’t need.

We’ve tested the best website builders on the market. We’ve quizzed professionals and first-time users. We’ve poked around in the dark corners of UIs. All to bring you this guide to the top website builders on the web. This comprehensive guide to the best website builders for 2023 contains everything you need to know when selecting a site builder.

What To Look For in a Website Builder

The most significant obstacle people face when using website builders is you don’t know what you don’t know. There’s so much information online that it’s hard to know where to start.

That’s why we put together this guide to the best website builders, so small businesses everywhere can make an informed decision about website building.

Choose a Site Builder With High-Quality Code

The first thing you need to look for is production-ready code. That means source code that is modern, robust, and hack-free. (All of the website builders on this list meet those criteria.)

Identify What A Successful Website Looks Like To You

Professional designers start by identifying a website’s purpose. Websites perform best when they have a clear purpose.

If you’re a wedding photographer, you will want to showcase your portfolio and generate new leads. You’ll want to sell products online if you own a clothing store. If you’re a community group, you want to raise awareness and encourage public interest.

Whatever your goal, a website builder listed below will help you achieve it. And choosing the best option for you will be a more straightforward process if you’re clear about that goal to start with.

Think About Design Flexibility

One of the defining characteristics of any website builder is how flexible its designs are. Some of the best website builders give you complete control over every detail of your design. Other website builders limit you to choosing from a selection of pre-designed blocks.

If you’re prepared to compromise on your design, you will have more options. On the other hand, if you want to achieve a specific look, you may need to opt for a more flexible website builder.

Be Honest With Yourself

Next, consider your own level of experience and the amount of time you have to invest in learning to use a tool and build a website. Some website builders will get you online fast, but even some of the best website builders take a little time to learn.

Some people can spare 3–4 hours every weeknight to learn how to leverage a complex website builder — that helps a lot when building a complex site like an online store. Other people have family commitments or social engagements and just need to get something done fast.

There’s no right or wrong answer. You don’t need prior experience, and you don’t need to commit to an evening course to get online. If you want to put a website online in 15 minutes and then forget about it, that’s fine. Make sure you choose a website builder that can help you do that.

Check Out the Support Options

Speaking of your experience, we don’t want to put a damper on things, but what will you do if something goes wrong?

Websites experience problems from which website builders are not exempt. Most of the best website builders use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for web hosting. But CDNs aren’t infallible.

Some site builders offer a free domain, and all of the best website builders allow you to use a custom domain name and free SSL certificate. What happens if there’s a problem with it? Does the site builder’s support extend to domains?

Happily, most website builders offer an excellent level of customer support. So before you start, check what help you’re entitled to and how to get assistance should a problem arise.

Make Full Use of Any Free Trial

Most of the best website builders offer a free trial or even a free-forever package. The free trial is your opportunity to try out the UI (User Interface) and get a feel for the product.

All the website builders we’ve listed below specialize in a particular type of site. Most cater to small business owners. Each has pros and cons and can help you achieve your online goals. However, in the end, the success of your site comes down to you; you can use a free web builder and still succeed if you’re willing to put in the work.

Trust your instincts: if you find a particular site builder intuitive, then the chances are you’ll be able to create a great website with it.

Wix: Best Website Builder for Small Business Owners

Wix is widely considered to be one of the best website builders of 2022, and a quick glance at its extensive list of features will tell you why we expect it to still be the top website builder platform in 2023.

First up is a vast number of templates giving you more selection than almost any rival. There’s so much choice that you’ll probably spend longer choosing your template than actually building your site!

Wix’s editor uses an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that enables anyone to create just about any design. It’s not the most straightforward editor on the market. Still, Wix has extensive documentation, so if you have the time to tackle a modest learning curve, you should quickly get to grips with the UI.

Of course, Wix also includes core features like custom domain names and free SSL certificates.

On top of these features, Wix provides various marketing tools to help your site grow toward profitability.

Finally, for freelancers and web design agencies, Wix provides Editor X, a professional solution for creating multiple websites for clients. Editor X is an excellent addition to Wix’s lineup. However, it’s not the best option for design agencies (keep reading to find out which tool we think tops Editor X).

Wix Features

Wix is the biggest website builder in the world and includes hundreds of features that make building a website simple. Here are just some of the highlights.

Huge Range of Templates

Wix boasts a huge range of 800+ customizable templates for every kind of business, from online stores to simple marketing sites.

Intuitive Drag and Drop Editor

Wix’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it a simple task to achieve almost any design with little to no design experience.

There are a couple of downsides to this approach. Firstly, many small business owners opt for a website builder because they need a guided design process — unlimited options can actually make things harder. Secondly, the highly flexible design system Wix offers can introduce unexpected bugs at different device sizes.

Editor X

Editor X is Wix’s solution for freelance designers and web design agencies. It allows you to build client sites with dedicated tools for professionals.

App Market

Wix’s AppMarket is a dedicated app store with hundreds of plugins that enable you to expand your website’s capabilities quickly and easily. You’ll find everything from table reservation apps for restaurants to social media integrations.

Velo

Velo is Wix’s open development platform for building web applications. This is an ambitious project that aims to move web builders into areas in which they typically cannot compete: complex web apps.

For most businesses, Velo is far beyond what you need; for most app developers, it isn’t enough yet. But it’s great to know this opportunity is on the horizon.

Ecommerce

Wix has a range of tools to help your ecommerce business grow. There are coupons, discounts, bookings, and shipping tools.

Ascend

Ascend is Wix’s built-in marketing suite. It includes a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) which is excellent for fostering long-term business relationships and eliminates the need for a third-party app.

Email Marketing Tools

Email is still the most effective way of staying in touch with your customers. Wix’s built-in email marketing tools make it easier to manage email campaigns, all from your Wix dashboard.

Free Domain

Wix will even give you a free domain for a year on everything except its basic package.

Pros

Relatively intuitive design process
Excellent documentation and quick-start guides
Reliable and secure system
Huge range of tools
Extensive plugin market

Cons

Sites are less responsive than some rivals
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) options are limited
Difficult to change templates once you’ve selected one
Image and video-heavy sites perform poorly on mobile devices
Design flexibility can introduce unexpected bugs

Pricing

Wix has multiple tiers of pricing depending on the features you require.

Note that the availability of some Wix plans varies depending on your location.

Website Plans

Website Plans are aimed at those users creating an individual site.

Combo: $16 per month — 2 Gb bandwidth and 3 Gb of storage, plus 30 minutes of video streaming.

Unlimited: $22 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 5Gb storage, 1 hour of video streaming, and access to marketing tools.

Pro: $27 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 50Gb storage, 2 hours of video, marketing tools, social media tools and priority support,

VIP: $45 per month — Unlimited bandwidth, 100Gb storage, 5 hours of video, marketing tools, social media tools, and priority support.

Business & Ecommerce Plans

If you want to accept payments online with Wix, you’ll need a business plan.

Business Basic: $27 per month — 20Gb storage space, 5 hours of video, online payments

Business Unlimited: $32 per month — 35 Gb of storage, 10 hours of video, multiple currencies, multi-channel selling, dropshipping, product reviews

Business VIP: $59 per month — 50Gb of storage, unlimited video, marketing, and sales tools, dropshipping, product reviews, and a loyalty program

Enterprise Plans

Wix provides custom solutions for enterprise customers. If you have a large site with complex needs, then Wix can design a complete solution for your brand. Contact Wix directly for pricing.

Bottom Line

Wix is one of the best website builders available for creating your own website. Its flexibility, massive range of features, and ability to scale are ideal for many new and established businesses. But, if anything, Wix’s vast range of options can be a hindrance and make its learning curve a little steeper than necessary.

Wix is a great allrounder, but it’s not the easiest, cheapest, or fastest website builder. So keep reading to discover the best alternatives to Wix.

Squarespace: Best Website Builder for Creatives

Squarespace is the ideal website builder for anyone for whom aesthetics are a primary concern; it boasts the most beautiful templates of any website builder.

On its higher tier packages, Squarespace allows ecommerce sites to host their own checkout. This is radically different from some website builders further down this list and ensures a consistent customer experience while maintaining a secure checkout.

For professional designers, Squarespace offers Circle, an invite-only program for professionals creating multiple sites in Squarespace. To qualify, you must build at least three websites on the Squarespace platform.

Squarespace Features

Beautiful Templates

Squarespace has hundreds of templates, widely considered to be amongst the most beautiful designs of any website builder.

Additionally, you can purchase Squarespace templates at a number of different design marketplaces, giving you even more options.

Powerful Ecommerce Features

Squarespace has everything you need to power an online store, from selling an individual item to a huge product range. You can even sell online classes.

Integrated Marketing Tools

Squarespace includes integrated marketing tools like email campaigns that carry your branding from your site to your customers’ inboxes.

Squarespace also includes a very capable blogging app with all the features you need to start publishing content that will engage your users and boost your position on SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Circle

Circle is Squarespace’s partner program for professional web designers. You will need to build at least three Squarespace websites to qualify.

Members of Circle get free educational content to keep their skills up to date and access to product betas.

Pros

Award-winning templates
Incredible customer support
Seamless integrations
Simple but powerful ecommerce features
Create a stunning site in 15 minutes

Cons

Steeper learning curve
Limitations on navigation
Slower than average page speed
Premium-priced plugins
No free domain
Custom CSS restricted to the business plans

Pricing

Squarespace offers four simple pricing plans. Additionally, you can save up to 30% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Personal: $23 per month — 2 contributors, curated templates, simple analytics, mobile version of sites

Business: $33 per month — unlimited contributors, business tools, advanced analytics, ecommerce with 3% transaction fees

Basic Commerce: $36 per month — unlimited contributors, business tools, ecommerce analytics, merchandising tools, 0% transaction fees.

Advanced Commerce: $65 per month — Everything in the basic commerce package plus abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, advanced shipping options, and discounts, as well as APIs for third-party integrations.

Bottom Line

Squarespace offers undeniably beautiful sites. Its editing experience takes a little getting used to but is far from complex. Its simple, transparent pricing means your costs are predictable, and there is genuine value in its 30% discount for paying annually.

Due to its shallower navigation, it’s best suited to smaller online stores with dozens rather than hundreds of products. However, artists and craftspeople will love selling their work on Squarespace.

Shopify: Best Website Builder for Online Stores

Shopify is the best-known website builder for creating an online store, and for a good reason. Few website builders manage to handle online sales with the grace of Shopify’s ecommerce features.

That does not mean it’s without its failings. The biggest issue for most Shopify users is the restriction on the number of product variants, which is capped at 100, and always seems to be reached too quickly. Another common gripe is the styling restrictions placed on the cart in the name of security, which prevent anything but basic styling from being applied to your checkout process.

Shopify is one of the best online website builders, but it eschews the usual drag-and-drop interface approach and instead uses templates and editable code.

Templates typically come with styling options, and there is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style editor for adding content. However, you’ll need to hire a developer or learn basic coding to customize your template significantly.

The upside of this approach is that there’s a vast Shopify ecosystem, with thousands of templates and plugins available in the dedicated store and on third-party marketplaces.

Shopify Features

Vast Number of Templates to Choose From

Shopify has a huge number of templates, there are hundreds of native templates, and there are thousands more available from third-party marketplaces.

Extensive Plugin Store

Shopify has an extensive plugin store with 6500+ add-ons, from apps to improve your UX to helpers to simplify third-party integrations with SaaS (Software as a Service) like Mailchimp and AliExpress.

Social Media Integration

Shopify isn’t just an online store; it makes selling products across multiple channels, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even email, a simple process.

Industry-Leading Education

Shopify has a plethora of resources to help you create an online store and maximize your sales. It provides online courses and community resources and a dedicated and knowledgeable customer support team.

Pros

Highly optimized checkout
Recognized and trusted platform
Sell across multiple channels like Etsy and Facebook
Huge app store
Manage large inventories easily
Fast customer support

Cons

Checkout has limited styling options
Coding knowledge is needed to fully extend Shopify
No simple drag-and-drop editor
Additional costs if buying a template or plugins
Steep learning curve compared to other website builders
Limits on the number of variations per product

Pricing

Shopify offers three website plans. You can save 50% if you pay annually instead of monthly.

Note: in addition to your plan, Shopify charges a per-sale percentage plus $0.30 for online transactions.

Basic: $29 per month — Basic reports, 2 staff accounts, 4 inventory locations, up to 77% shipping discount, 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Shopify: $79 per month — Professional reports, 5 staff accounts, 5 inventory locations, up to 88% shipping discount, 2.6% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Advanced: $299 per month — Custom reports, 15 staff accounts, 8 inventory locations, up to 88% shipping discount, 2.4% + $0.30 fee per transaction

Shopify is aimed at small businesses but also provides ShopifyPlus, an enterprise-grade solution for high-volume businesses that starts at $2,000 per month.

Bottom Line

Shopify sets the bar for ecommerce solutions. When it comes to selling online, it’s the first choice for many businesses.

Shopify occupies the middle ground between website builders and custom solutions. As such, making changes is difficult. Once you’ve chosen your template and exhausted the built-in features of the template, your only recourse for further changes is to hire a developer (or learn to code).

Shopify is laser-focused on ecommerce, so it’s a poor choice for anything but ecommerce. However, if you’re aiming to quickly establish an online store with scope to grow, Shopify is impossible to beat.

Webflow: Best Website Builder for Design Agencies

Webflow is a website builder geared solidly towards freelancers and design agencies concerned with building a website for their clients.

For professional website designers who possess at least a passing understanding of HTML & CSS, Webflow is an ideal way to create a website.

With its white labeling and a complete CMS (Content Management System), Webflow allows you to serve sites to clients as custom builds. Clients can then edit content in a simplified dashboard called Editor; this lessens the learning curve for clients and avoids the risk of them fiddling with site-breaking settings.

Webflow Features

Full CMS

Webflow employs a full CMS (Content Management System) to separate design and content and allow you to use data to create a website rapidly. In this respect it’s like a the best elements of Wix and WordPress combined.

Powerful Design Process

With Webflow you have the option to fully customize almost every aspect of your design, without code.

Start with a blank canvas, or a template, then use the drag-and-drop editor to add HTML elements onto your page. Create reusable symbols to speed up your site creation.

White Labeling

White labeling means teams can create client sites in Webflow without the client knowing how the site is built — design agencies don’t have to worry about clients cutting out the middleman and going straight to Webflow to save money.

Webflow Enterprise

Most website builders are out of their depth when it comes to enterprise-grade sites with high volumes of traffic. Not so Webflow, which delivers advanced security, traffic scaling, and guaranteed uptime for its enterprise customers.

Pros

Comprehensive SEO tools
Extensive customization options
Industry-leading documentation
Excellent for client work
Fast customer support
Awesome free plan

Cons

Not beginner-friendly
No plugin store
HTML & CSS knowledge advisable
Membership sites are only in beta
Complicated pricing
Eye-wateringly expensive

Pricing

Webflow offers a multitude of pricing options depending on whether you’re an individual, a reseller, or an online store.

If you’re running an individual site you’ll need either a website plan or an ecommerce plan. If you’re an agency planning to resell Webflow to your clients you’ll need a workspace plan for your team in addition to a website or ecommerce plan for every client site you publish.

Website Plans

If you’re an individual, Webflow provides three plans to choose from. You can save up to 22% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Basic: $18 per month — 0 CMS items, 500 form submissions per month, 50Gb bandwidth.

CMS: $29 per month — 2,000 CMS items, 1,000 for submissions per month, 200Gb bandwidth, and up to 3 guest editors

Business: $49 per month — 10,000 CMS items, 2,500 form submissions per month, 400Gb bandwidth, up to 10 guest editors

Ecommerce Plans

To unlock features specifically designed for online selling, you need to opt for one of Webflow’s ecommerce plans. You can save up to 30% by opting to pay annually instead of monthly.

Standard: $42 per month — includes everything in the individual CMS plan, plus 500 products, 2% transaction fee, and a maximum of $50,000 in annual sales

Plus: $84 per month — includes everything in the individual business plan, plus 1,000 products, 0% transaction fee and a maximum of $200,000 in annual sales

Advanced: $235 per month — includes everything in the individual business plan, plus 3,000 products, 0% transaction fee, and unlimited annual sales

Team Plans

For teams, Webflow offers workspace plans in addition to website and ecommerce plans. There is a free plan while you learn Webflow, and you can save up to 33% by paying annually.

Note that team plans are charged per seat, so for example, the cost for four designers of the Growth package is $240 per month (not $60 per month).

Core: $28 / seat per month — for small in-house teams, up to 3 seats, a maximum of 10 unhosted sites, custom code and code export.

Growth: $60 / seat per month — for growing in-house teams, up to 9 seats, unlimited hosted sites, custom code, custom export.

Freelancer: $24 / seat per month — for freelancers or small agencies, up to 3 seats, full CMS access on unhosted sites

Agency: $42 / seat per month — for agencies, up to 9 seats, full CMS access on unhosted sites

Large teams with more than 9 team members will need to contact Webflow for its enterprise plan, which promises unlimited seats.

Bottom Line

Webflow is aimed at design agencies and freelancers who need a web host for client work and is one of the best website builders for managing multiple sites.

Due to its advanced feature set, Webflow is relatively complex to use. However, it is far simpler than a bespoke site, and anyone with a cursory understanding of web technologies should master it in a short space of time. Additionally, its Editor feature simplifies it for clients.

Unfortunately, Webflow’s ecommerce plans are expensive and ecommerce features are limited. Anyone looking to sell online might want to consider other site builders instead.

If you’re a design agency building multiple client sites, Webflow is an excellent platform to adopt…if you can afford the team plans.

Duda: Best Website Builder for SEO

Duda website builder has been outperforming its rivals since 2021, when Google introduced Core Web Vitals and, in the process, made SEO all about speed.

Duda produces blazing-fast, reliable sites and, in doing so, ticks all of Google’s boxes for a quality site that it wants to rank highly.

On top of this, Duda provides a white-label option, allowing design agencies to build sites for clients on the platform. In fact, this is what Duda was initially created for.

Duda offers beautiful design in a simple-to-use package. As such, it produces some of the best no-code websites.

Duda Features

Simple Editor

Duda offers a Simple Editor option that allows you to provide your clients with a simple website builder of their own. Predesign elements that work together, then let your clients combine them in whatever way they please.

Clients will feel empowered, and you get a website project out the door with less work and fewer revisions.

White Labeling

Duda is aimed squarely at freelancers and design agencies that want to foster an ongoing relationship with their clients.

Team Libraries

Build your own library of widgets, templates, and sections. Share across your entire team, so client projects are created with your in-house approach.

Omni-Channel Ecommerce

Duda enables ecommerce sales across the web and social media, with your inventory synced everywhere you sell, from Facebook to eBay and Amazon.

Managing a store is simple with store management apps for iOS and Android.

Pros

Extremely fast page speed
Beautiful templates
Award-winning customer support
Intuitive drag-n-drop interface

Cons

Relatively expensive
Limited plugin store

Pricing

Website Plans

Duda offers three pricing plans for websites, and you can save up to 33% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Basic: $19 per month — 1 website, email customer support only, no team or client collaboration

Team: $29 per month — 1 website, email chat and phone customer support, up to four team members, white label client access

Agency: $59 per month — 4 websites, priority email chat and phone customer support, up to ten team members, white label client access, widget builder, export control

Duda also offers custom plans for clients with enterprise-grade sites; contact them directly for pricing.

Ecommerce Plans

Duda provides ecommerce features as an add-on, which means if you want to use Duda to create an online store, you need to sign up for one of their website plans as well as one of their ecommerce plans.

Note: you can pair any of the ecommerce plans with any of the website plans; they don’t need to scale together.

You can save up to 25% on Duda’s ecommerce plans by paying annually instead of monthly.

Standard: $8 per month — Up to 100 products

Advanced: $22 per month — Up to 2,500 products, sell subscriptions

Unlimited: $49 per month — Unlimited products, sell subscriptions, Square PoS integration

Bottom Line

SEO is a complex subject, and many factors feed your ranking on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

What is universally accepted is that fast pages translate into a better ranking.

If you’re looking for a blazing-fast website builder to help you establish a strong online presence, Duda must be near the top of your shortlist.

WordPress.com: Best WordPress Website Builder

WordPress is a juggernaut of an app; its rise has been unstoppable, and 43% of the web is made up of WordPress sites. Furthermore, WordPress.com — not to be confused with WordPress.org — is a WordPress site builder. That means all you need to do is log in and have all the power and flexibility of WordPress at your fingertips.

The downside to all this power is that WordPress.com is a big step up in complexity from most of the site builders on this list. It’s not as complex as its self-hosted sibling, but you’ll still need to spend some time getting acquainted with the advanced features.

You’ve probably heard that WordPress is insecure. We’re sorry to say that’s true. WordPress’ main vulnerability is its third-party themes and plugins — the commonality of a WordPress site means criminals consider it worth exploiting. WordPress.com web hosting is considerably more secure than self-hosted WordPress.org, but hey, it’s still WordPress.

But if you decide the security risk is acceptable, WordPress.com offers an ecosystem of themes and plugins unparalleled for its range and variety.

WordPress.com Features

Huge Ecosystem

WordPress has a vast ecosystem, perhaps the largest of any design software. There are thousands of professionally designed themes, and over 50,000 plugins, providing enormous scope for customization.

When vulnerabilities are found, more often than not, it’s the result of a flaw in a plugin update. So if you install a lot of plugins, you are exposing yourself to increasing security risks.

Unfortunately, in order to take advantage of the WordPress ecosystem, you need to be on one of WordPress.com’s higher-priced plans.

Secure Web Hosting Service

WordPress sites are notoriously insecure, but WordPress.com solves most of the issues thanks to a dedicated security team.

Drag-and-Drop Editor

The whole WordPress community has been working on evolving the design process from coded templates to a drag-and-drop editor called Gutenberg. Gutenberg started out small, but it gets better all the time and now offers a good level of design control without overwhelming beginners with too many options.

Pros

Generous free plan
Intuitive drag-and-drop editor
No installation required
Great live chat support
Ideal for blogging
50,000+ plugins
Vast number of templates
Secure web hosting service

Cons

Unintuitive
Slow page-load times
Persistent security concerns
Premium templates and plugins are restricted to more expensive plans.
SEO locked behind more expensive plans

Pricing

There is a generous free plan that is ideal for getting started. Beyond that WordPress.com offer four price tiers. You can save up to 50% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Note: many of WordPress.com’s best plugins are not free; make sure you budget for the cost of any plugins you intend to use.

Personal: $4 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments

Premium: $8 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, install premium themes, Google Analytics integration

Business: $25 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, Google Analytics integration, install plugins, automated site backups.

eCommerce: $45 per month — Remove WordPress.com ads, collect payments, earn ad revenue, Google Analytics integration, install plugins, automated site backups, accept payments in 60+ countries, top shipping carrier integration, premium design options.

WordPress.com also provides WordPress VIP, an enterprise-grade package that starts at $25,000 per year.

Bottom Line

Opting to use WordPress.com boils down to one thing: building a website with the WordPress ecosystem. That means you must select at least the Premium price tier (to install premium themes) or the Business price tier (to install plugins). As a result, WordPress.com, on the lower packages, has limited appeal.

WordPress.com is one of the better choices on this list for blogging. If you hope to attract a lot of organic traffic from search engines, then WordPress.com’s blogging heritage will serve you well.

GoDaddy: Best Website Builder for Marketing

GoDaddy is best known for website hosting but does not have the best reputation regarding reliable software; however, its web builder dispels that myth by producing good quality code and decent page speed.

Unfortunately, it achieves its performance by limiting your design options. For example, you can’t add individual elements to your site; you must add whole sections and customize them. However, suppose you don’t feel particularly confident with design. In that case, having someone else make those decisions for you can be a real bonus.

A big flaw with GoDaddy’s ecommerce features is that the checkout isn’t hosted under your domain name; it’s hosted on a third-party website. Consumers are increasingly concerned about scams, and the site URL changing this way can feel like a real red flag.

GoDaddy website builder has a version control system built in. This helpful feature allows you to revert back to an older version of your site. So if you make a change, undoing it is just a couple of clicks. That’s great for websites that want to make temporary, seasonal changes to their website and then revert back to the everyday design.

GoDaddy Features

AI-Powered Advice

GoDaddy uses a surprisingly effective AI to offer advice, helping you to establish an online presence and boost your business.

Integrated Marketing Features

GoDaddy has some of the most comprehensive marketing tools of any website builder. SEO, social media, and email marketing can all be employed to connect with and retain customers.

Hundreds of Themes

GoDaddy offers hundreds of customizable themes that you can edit with no technical skill or experience.

Free Image Library

Lots of businesses struggle with images when they first start out. GoDaddy has a built-in library of professional images that you can use until you have your own.

Pros

Award-winning 24/7 support
Very simple to use
Quick build process
Add-on tools

Cons

No plugin store
Limited SEO, especially on lower plans
Limited styling options
Ecommerce checkout hosted elsewhere

Pricing

GoDaddy offers four simple pricing tiers. You can save up to 37% by paying annually instead of monthly.

Note: The availability of GoDaddy Plans varies depending on your territory.

Basic: $9.99 per month — 1 social media platform, 5 social posts per month, 100 email marketing sends per month

Premium: $14.99 per month — Unlimited social media, 25,000 email marketing sends per month, SEO tools, group events, paid appointments

Ecommerce: $16.99 per month — Unlimited social media, 25,000 email marketing sends per month, SEO tools, group events, paid appointments, product listings, flexible payments, promotional features

Bottom Line

GoDaddy isn’t the best overall website builder, and neither is it the cheapest website builder. But it is a good, solid, middle-of-the-road choice for small businesses.

Where GoDaddy website builder does excel is in the business tools that come with its site builder platform. Its marketing tools are excellent, and its new AI-powered hints are a great way of guiding you toward a profitable site.

Wrap all of this up at a competitive price, and GoDaddy is worth a look if you want to do all your web design and promotion in one place.

Carrd: Best Website Builder for One-Pagers

Carrd is website builder software for anyone building a one-page site. One-page sites are ideal for product microsites, event sites, small companies, time-limited promotions, contact forms, and many other websites.

One of the most complicated tasks when a software company sets out to create a website builder is navigation. Carrd circumvents that problem by eliminating the need for navigation, which results in a more straightforward UI, compact code, and faster page speeds.

There is a bit of a learning curve with Carrd. For example, it helps if you understand the basic principles of CSS. But if you don’t, the documentation will help. And getting to the nuts and bolts under the hood of your site can give you a real sense of ownership.

Carrd allows you to build and publish three sites for free. But if you want to publish more than three and use pro features like custom domains, it will charge you $19 per year — that’s just $1.58 per month.

Carrd Features

Sensational Value

Carrd is one of the cheapest website builders around. At just $19 for an entire year, you normally struggle to find plain web hosting this cheaply.

The price reflects the limited feature set — Carrd lacks the marketing and SEO tools that the top website builders have — but for many small businesses who just want to establish an online presence quickly, a one-page site is exactly what they need.

Custom Code

Unlike many of the premium website builders on this list, Carrd allows you to use custom code on its sites.

Custom code requires a little more knowledge than the average site builder, and many people prefer a drag-and-drop interface. However, adding custom code to Carrd is far easier than adding it to Shopify, for example.

Widgets

Carrd refers to its plugins as widgets. It doesn’t have a full app market or ecommerce features, but you can add widgets from services like Stripe and PayPal to expand the capabilities of your Carrd site.

Pros

Very low cost
Perfect for one-page sites

Cons

Steeper than expected learning curve
Limited to one-page sites
No free domain or free SSL certificate

Pricing

Carrd allows you to publish three branded sites for free. It only has one paid plan, which is billed per year. Carrd also provides a free seven-day trial.

Note: Carrd’s Pro plan allows you to build multiple sites.

Carrd Pro: $1.58 per month (billed annually at $19) — build more than three sites, custom domains, signup forms, payment forms, Google Analytics, widgets, custom code

Bottom Line

Carrd is an excellent website builder that outputs solid production code. If you need to get a one-page site online fast, then Carrd is a perfect choice.

At just $19 for a whole year, Carrd is one of the best-value website builders on this list.

Unfortunately, one-page sites typically have a limited lifespan, and sooner or later, you’ll want to expand. At this point, Carrd will cease to be a viable option and you’ll have to look at other website builders.

But at this price, you could have a one-pager up in the next 15 minutes. That’s hard to knock.

Square Online: Best Website Builder for IRL Businesses

Square Online is part of the Square product range that includes one of the most popular PoS (Point of Sale) solutions. Square Online is an excellent option for brick-and-mortar businesses that exist IRL (In Real Life). It’s also one of the few entries on this list that qualifies as a free website builder.

Square acquired the Weebly website builder in 2018 and redeployed staff to develop Square Online. Although Weebly continues to exist, all development seems channeled into making Square Online’s ecommerce features the best option for building an online store.

Square Online is more straightforward than Shopify for building an online store and offers a range of tools to integrate online and offline business.

Square Online is perfect for businesses that need an online store but feel website building is too technical. Its broader ecosystem of business tools means you can do everything digital in one place, with a consistent set of UIs and workflows, which makes things easier.

Square Online Features

POS Migration

If you’re already a customer of Square’s PoS (Point of Sale) products, then you can export your inventory from your PoS device and import it into your online store, saving yourself hours while ensuring that your products are synced.

Multichannel Sales

Square Online is just part of the Square group of products. Consequently, your sales aren’t limited to your website. As well as the obvious PoS option, Google, Instagram, and Facebook integrations are available.

Restaurant Tools

Square is particularly well-suited to restaurants, bars, and cafes. It provides scheduling software, team management, and loyalty cards, all of which make running a service business online a cinch.

Pros

Simple e-commerce features
Intuitive UI
Integration with the Square ecosystem
Generous free plan

Cons

Limited design options
Lengthy website building process

Pricing

Square Online offers three price plans, all of which are priced monthly but billed annually. Its lowest-priced tier is free, except for card processing fees.

Note: different pricing plans are available in different territories.

Free: $0 per month — Unlimited products, sell on social media, SEO tools

Plus: $?? per month (billed annually) — Free tier features, Advanced item settings, Accept PayPal

Premium: $?? per month (billed annually) — Plus tier features, reduced processing rate, real-time shipping rates

In addition, Square Online offers an enterprise solution for high-volume, multi-location businesses. Contact Square directly for pricing.

Bottom Line

With the financial backing of its parent company Square Online has the resources to evolve into a world-leading website builder; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Like a couple of other website builders on this list, Square Online is aimed directly at anyone who wants to build an online store — or, in fact, commerce in general. So you should look elsewhere if selling online isn’t central to your site.

But suppose you’re already invested in the Square ecosystem with PoS devices in physical locations. In that case, using Square Online is a no-brainer.

And if you’re willing to look past some of the design restrictions in favor of good customer service and the potential of a growing platform, then Square Online is a solid choice too.

Zyro: Best Budget Website Builder

Zyro is exceptionally cheap, especially for building an online store. But don’t let that fool you into thinking Zyro website builder is low on quality. On the contrary, hidden behind the low-ball sales pitch is a competent website builder with many features.

Zyro gives you complete control over the placement of your content, something that only Wix can rival.

Zyro offers an outstanding balance of powerful customization but not too many tools, so you won’t be overwhelmed by all the options.

Zyro doesn’t have a built-in app store like some rivals, which means you have limited options to expand the functionality of your site. However, it does offer some third-party integrations to services, so you’re not entirely without options.

Zyro Features

Intuitive Editor

Zyro does a tremendous job of getting new businesses online because you don’t need any experience to use this very simple site builder.

Unlimited Storage & Bandwidth

Many website builders usually scrimp on the extras and claw back a little money by charging extra for hosting. Not so Zyro, which provides unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Branding Tools

Zyro includes a logo maker, so if you’re starting from scratch, you can get give yourself some professional gloss with a shiny new logo.

Pros

Affordable
Great value ecommerce
Responsive templates
High-level control of design elements
Live chat support
Drag-and-drop editor

Cons

Basic blog options
Only basic SEO tools
No built-in app market

Pricing

Zyro offers two price plans, one for simple small business websites and one for ecommerce.

Note: Zyro offers regular discounts of up to 75% off its packages. These discounts are time-limited, but once they expire, they reset. So you won’t miss out if you decide to think it over.

Website: $2.99 / month — free domain, free email for 3 months, marketing integration, logo maker

Business: $3.99 / month — All of the features of the Website tier, plus sell up to 500 products

Bottom Line

With its AI-powered logo maker, fast build times, and simple options, Zyro is committed to getting you online fast.

We really didn’t like the deception of placing a fake countdown on the price discount. And hiding the increased renewal price in small print isn’t a good look for Zyro either. That type of blackhat UX doesn’t have a place on the modern web.

However, the prices beat almost everything except free website builder plans. In addition, Zyro’s ecommerce package is one of the most affordable options on the market, with an equally generous 1% transaction processing fee.

If you want to set up a side business over a weekend or even over your lunch hour, then Zyro is an excellent choice.

Website Builder FAQs

What is a website builder?

A website builder, or site builder, is a service for creating a website without any design or coding skills. The most popular website builders are designed to democratize the web by helping anyone build a website quickly and easily.

It sometimes helps to have some design ideas, and some website builders will allow you to add custom code if you want to, but neither is required.

With a website builder, all you need is the desire to create a website.

Are websites built with website builders as good as professionally built bespoke websites?

Because website builders are created with many potential uses in mind, they use generic source code. Unfortunately, this means that their code is typically less streamlined than a bespoke site.

However, over the past few years, the code quality that website builders generate has improved enormously. Now, many professional design agencies use website builders instead of coding their own websites.

If you have a very specialized site in mind, like a SaaS (Software as a Service, then even the best website builder won’t be able to create it. But for marketing websites and online stores, website builders are an ideal way to build a website.

How much do website builders cost?

The cost of a website builder varies from product to product. There are free website builders available, but many of the top website builders charge a monthly fee.

For one of the best website builders, you can expect to pay a subscription based on the features you require. Expect to pay more for e-commerce features, marketing features, and a flexible drag-and-drop interface.

There are sometimes hidden costs, such as a card processing fee for online sales.

If you opt for a website builder that uses templates or plugins, you may need to pay for those in addition to the subscription.

You don’t need to pay for web hosting services; web hosting should be included.

Most website builders offer a limited free plan or a free trial, so you can test out features before opening your wallet.

Is a website builder suitable for a small business?

It depends on the nature of your business. For example, suppose you’re setting up an online store or a professional service like plumbing or landscaping. In that case, a website builder or perhaps a specialist e-commerce website builder could be ideal for you.

On the other hand, if you’re running a business like a car dealership or a travel agency — where you need lots of individual listings — that is a little beyond what website builders can do. In that case, you’ll probably need a complete CMS (Content Management System).

If you are building a complex app or SaaS, then sorry, but website builders can’t manage that; you’ll need to hire a professional developer or improve your coding knowledge.

How hard is it to use a website builder?

You don’t need web design experience to use a website builder; they are designed to get new businesses online without professional assistance.

Some website builders are more complicated than others. Typically, the more features there are, the more time you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the user interface. A website can be created quickly with a drag-and-drop editor, but you may find you need to put in a little more work if you’re creating an online store.

As a guide, if you can use email, a web browser, or a document processor like Word or Pages, you’ll be able to use a website builder to build a website.

Can you use a custom domain name with a website builder?

Custom domains, like myawesomewebsite.com, can usually be used with website builders.

Be aware that some website builders charge more for this option. But equally, you may be offered free domain name registration, at least for the first year.

Do I need web hosting services to use a website builder?

You don’t need to worry about a web host; that’s part of what you’re paying the website builder to provide.

Many website builders even host your site on CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), making your site faster for a global audience.

Depending on your package, most website builders restrict the storage space you can use (the total size of all of your files combined). Some website builders also limit the bandwidth you can use (the total size of all the files users access on your site combined).

Do website builders perform well on search engines?

Getting your site to page one on Google is the primary aim for most businesses.

Many professional techniques boost your site up search engine rankings, but they all boil down to publishing good content and fast page load times.

You’ll find plenty of blog posts online claiming that website builders output low-quality and slow code. This used to be true, but in recent years the code website builders’ output has improved significantly.

A good website builder (like the ones on this list) won’t guarantee good search engine ranking, but the top website builders include marketing features that will help.

How long does it take to build a website with a website builder?

Some website builders can get you online in under five minutes. Others require hours of build time.

Typically, the more complex a site is, the longer it will take. Ecommerce, for example, will take longer than a simple résumé webpage.

Additionally, websites are not a once-and-done task. You will need to update your site, change information, and add features throughout its life.

But you’ll find that most website builders make this easy by taking away the hard work. As a result, most first-time website builders discover that they enjoy making websites, and some even decide to become professional website designers!

What is a drag-and-drop editor?

A drag-and-drop editor is exactly what it sounds like. You drag an element into position by clicking on it, and you drop it into place by releasing the mouse button when it’s positioned as you want it.

A drag-and-drop editor is considered a premium feature of the best website builders, but some people do prefer to make changes with code or via a simple form interface.

Which is the best website builder?

There isn’t a catch-all approach to building a website. The right website builder for you might not be the right website builder for someone else.

As you can see from the list above, Wix is a solid all-rounder, whereas Shopify is excellent for creating an online store. However, there are many occasions when other website builders would be a better choice.

Sometimes it comes down to something as simple as feeling an affinity with the website builder’s philosophy. If you find a website builder intuitive and it provides all the features you need, it’s the right website builder for you.

Featured image by upklyak on Freepik

The post 10 Best Website Builders for 2023 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

24 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked)

A robust email marketing strategy is a great way to reach your target audience directly.

But your email marketing campaign success rests on whether you used the best email marketing services.

No two email marketing services are equal. So you must choose carefully. We created this guide and ranked the 12 best email marketing services for you.

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Services

Although we ranked these best email marketing services in this list from number one to eleven, we also understand that everyone’s need is unique. So we identified where each email marketing tool performs best.

Here’s what to keep in mind to find a good email marketing service:

Your business goals
Growth stage of the business
The audience your business targets

Please read on for the best email marketing services in the market today.

1. ActiveCampaign: Best Advanced Email Automation

If your goal is to deliver timely, personalized, and unique email experiences to your customers, try ActiveCampaign. As the best email marketing service for putting your marketing on autopilot, this tool offers a built-in email automation system, a campaign tracker, and a CRM.

Unique Feature: Customer experience automation (CXA)
Target Users: eCommerce, B2B, B2C, SMEs, bloggers, and influencers
Pricing: $29 per month.

Features

ActiveCampaign offers users loads of beginner-friendly advanced automation features. Here are a few:

1. Automated Marketing

You can focus on other important business pursuits and let ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation send welcome emails, track contact tags, monitor sales analytics, and fetch performance reports.

This feature empowers users to launch automatic email marketing campaigns or follow up on customers who abandoned their carts or disengaged from their content.

2. Site and Event Tracking

ActiveCampaign records your site visitors’ consumer behavior and demographic information in real-time. So you can segment your email list better and target your audience with messages that resonate with them.

Gathering visitor data can help you engage with them emotionally or during memorable events like anniversaries, birthdays, and other milestones.

3. Free Migration

ActiveCampaign offers a seamless move from your previous automated marketing service provider.

Best part? Migrating to ActiveCampaign comes at no cost to you.

Simply request for migration by filling out a quick form. And you’re on your way to a better email marketing experience.

4. Segmentation

Image Credit: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign groups your email contacts into different categories to enable you to make sense of the data.

You can segment a contact list by name, date, location, subscription status, tags, and other metadata.

Segmented data helps you target the most conversion-ready audience for the particular campaign.

5. Third-Party Integrations

You’re free to link your favorite apps with ActiveCampaign if it enhances your business growth.

So you can integrate your account with third-party apps like

Facebook to pull ad or public user data
Shopify to pull sales and shop data
Google Sheets for spreadsheet operations
WooCommerce for eCommerce performance data

You don’t need to move contacts across email marketing platforms to access or manage your data. ActiveCampaign lets you keep your data on the platform you wish to use and then use integrations to extract the benefits of having those contacts.

6. Performance Reporting

Get real-time reports on your deals and sales activities using ActiveCampaign. The reports feature lets you know your campaign’s performance across these indicators:

Subscriptions
Subscriber engagement
Automation reports
Sales rep deal pipelines
Revenue generation
Customer attribution reports

ActiveCampaign lets you track your competitors by providing reports of users who switched to competitors.

You also get a funnel report to see how well your email marketing effort converts engaged audiences to buyers.

7. One-on-one Messaging

ActiveCampaign lets you start and manage conversations with current and prospective customers across multiple channels.

Send and receive instant direct messages, which you can also automate in full.

Customers will quickly reach you with questions and orders without losing their messages in your email pile.

More Features

Automation templates
Email Templates
Email drag-and-drop builder
Branded Forms
Tags
Split Automations

Pros

ActiveCampaign is feature rich. You can fully integrate other applications on the platform without losing vital leads and data.

This email marketing software positions itself (and rightly so) as a leading email marketing solution that encompasses other parts of marketing and your CRM needs.

You can enjoy its free email marketing service offering for 14 days.

Cons

Although ActiveCampaign promises many features, most of them are exclusive to users who subscribe to paid plans. Sadly, this email marketing tool doesn’t offer a free plan.

Also, the workflows and features are sophisticated. So this email service provider will demand a learning curve.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign offers four paid plans—Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. The enterprise plan is customizable to meet the peculiar needs of big businesses.

Each plan is billed monthly at:

Lite: $29 per month

Plus: $49 per month

Professional: $149 per month

Enterprise: Customized rate

2. Sendinblue: Best Free Plan and Instant Messaging

Sendinblue provides users with instant messaging features, sales enablement software, and email marketing tools to grow their businesses.

If you’re looking to engage users more instantly through SMS and chats along with your email campaigns, then Sendinblue is the solution. As the best email marketing software for instant messaging, Sendinblue has personalization features to help you engage better with your target audience.

Unique Feature: Email and SMS marketing
Target Users: Retailers and CPG, SaaS, media, publishing, public sector, NGOs, and hospitality industry
Pricing: Starts at $25 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

Sendinblue offers over 40 responsive and professional pre-made email templates from which to choose.

If those are not enough, you can create bespoke email templates. Again, you’ll find the platform intuitive. In addition, you can use templates on multiple devices for the best results.

2. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Modify emails to your taste by simply dragging and dropping items on the campaign template.

Sendinblue is one of the most advanced email marketing services today. For example, it takes personalization seriously. So you can craft the content of your emails to appeal to your target audience better.

3. Email Tracking

If you wish to measure campaign performance rate or monitor engagement on certain emails, Sendinblue provides the option of turning on your Google Analytics tracker.

Google Analytics generates insights by drawing your customer information from all over the internet, including their behavior on social media.

4. Live Chat

Sendinblue lets you initiate instant communication with your site visitors through chat. Live chat is a handy email for engaging your leads at critical moments.

You can install this feature in seconds, assign conversations to your team, and customize the chat feature for your brand.

5. Contact Segmentation

Every contact is different and often has unique preferences.

Target the right audience with the most suitable message by exploring Sendinblue’s segmentation; this categorizes contacts and helps you determine, create and push a tailor-made campaign to a ready market.

6. SMS and Whatsapp Marketing

Sendinblue allows you to send your desired SMS volume to any chosen destination for a token.

You can also reach numerous contacts on your Whatsapp with customized messages about your business.

A recent report says that 69% of internet users use Whatsapp. So, you want to get your message to this audience.

7. Shared Inbox

Does managing all your conversations from a single place appeal to you?

With Sendinblue inbox, you can navigate smoothly between chats from your linked Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook accounts.

Keep your team and customers updated simultaneously with a simple inbox setup.

This Shared Inbox feature enhances organization.

More Features

Schedule send
CRM automation
Editable signup form
Push notifications

Pros

Sendinblue’s free email marketing software offers advanced features for startups and supports unlimited contacts. Except you need to do more, you can function solely on the free plan.

As the best email marketing software for initiating instant communication with leads, this email marketing tool promises a simple user interface and instant account setup.

Also, Sendinblue is relatively cheaper compared to similar email marketing providers.

Cons

You can only send 300 emails daily on the free version of Sendinblue. A paid subscription is required to remove the Sendinblue logo from your emails.

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, Sendinblue offers three other monthly plans—Starter Plan at $25, Business Plan at $65 per month, and Enterprise Plan at $1000 per month.

3. Drip: Best for Pre-Built Email Workflows

Drip is a personalized email, SMS, and automation service provider trusted by thousands of brands globally. It provides a seamless email workflow for businesses of all sizes.

- Unique Feature: pre-built email and SMS workflows

Target Users: eCommerce industry
Pricing: starts at $39 per month

Features

1. Pre-built Playbooks

Handling every marketing operation by yourself is overwhelming.

Save precious business time by using any pre-designed Drip templates.

The playbooks with heart-melting welcome series and abandoned cart reminders are ideal for growing your revenue.

Choose a suitable visual workflow and automate it fully.

2. Email Builder

If you like your emails deeply personalized and right on target, you’ll find Drip’s HTML builder useful.

Create 100 percent original content from scratch.

Personalized emails prove to your customers that you go the extra length and they’re special to you.

3. Drag and Drop Editor

Customize emails to capture your brand image using its ultra-easy drag-and-drop email editor.

People and businesses exchange over 306 billion email messages daily. Your audience is already getting tons of messages. Stand out with branded emails.

The visual interface is vibrant and can help boost your creativity.

4. Pop-up Notifications

Get access to form templates that your on and off-site visitors can easily fill out on Drip.

You can redirect, engage, sponsor specific actions, offer discounts to customers and grow your audience with targeted pop-up notifications and forms.

Pop-ups and signup forms convert about 3.09% of site visitors.

5. Real-Time Business Insights

Gain insights on your growth, audience, revenue, and overall campaign performance with Drip analytics and benchmark.

That’s not all.

Drip supports users with personalized guides to help them make informed decisions using these data that lead to business growth.

6. Marketing Automation

Your emails and SMS can run on autopilot without taking on the stress of maintaining correspondence with new and existing customers.

Simply set up revenue-targeted workflows and relax.

Since Drip comes with pre-built workflows, you don’t have to start your automation process from scratch.

7. Single Click Integration

Are you a new or an existing business owner? Drip supports your business on multiple channels.

Fully merge or connect your online store like Shopify, Magento, and other eCommerce tools to your Drip account with just one click. Easy breezy.

You can start conversations on your e-store and finish in your inbox.

More Features

Segmentation
Email support
A/B testing

Pros

Apart from unlimited email sends, Drip lets you access its advanced features and all the tools on its platform during your 14 days free trial.

Users get tailored assistance and live support when they need them. In addition, Drip simplifies the scaling process for businesses.

Cons

Although you get unlimited emails, this plan doesn’t support unlimited contacts and doesn’t offer a free plan. However, you have unlimited features access. But Drip limits usage by the number of contacts.

Pricing

More than ten paid plans starting at $39 up to more than $1,899 and billed monthly. Email contacts vary by plan, but you can send unlimited emails and email support for all paid plans.

4. Constant Contact: Best for Educators, Small Businesses, and Event Organizers

Constant Contact simplifies email marketing for event marketers and small businesses as one of the best email marketing providers. This email marketing solution helps users benefit from their email marketing effort without the typical steep learning curve of complicated email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Event management tools
Target Users: Small businesses and event organizers
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month

Features

1. Marketing Automation

Constant Contact empowers small businesses to put their email marketing on autopilot. You can segment your lists automatically and initiate campaigns without manual effort. You can also set drip campaigns and automation to trigger based on your audience behavior, data, or events.

You can resend messages under different subject lines to contacts who didn’t open them the first time.

2. List Building and Management tools

You can access a range of list-building tools on Constant Contact to help you attract and keep leads. In addition, you can access a landing page builder, form builder, text message signup FTW, and a contact management system.

3. Event Management

One of this email marketing service’s biggest selling points is its event management tools. Users can create signup forms for their events, build unlimited landing pages, create email follow-ups, and collect payments using tools available on Constant Contact.

4. Email Templates

Users can find more than 100 mobile-friendly, drag-and-drop email templates on Constant Contact that match different business types and brands. So you will find the appropriate template for the occasion regardless of industry, market, design preference, holiday, event, or other needs.

5. Surveys and Feedback Tools

Constant Contact understands that customer feedback and extra data can improve your marketing performance. You can consider Constant Contact the best email marketing service for getting feedback through surveys and polls.

You can customize these surveys with your branding and logo on your Constant Contact dashboard.

6. Responsive Email Editor

Constant Contact makes email editing a breeze for users with smart columns, undo-redo, an image library, color customizations, fonts, backgrounds, and more. In addition, its preview function lets you see what your email would look like across devices, so you can adjust your design or message to your heart’s content before sending it out.

7. Marketing Calendar

Unlike most email service providers, Constant Contact offers marketing calendars. The feature helps plan your marketing. Marketers can create their messages, schedule them, send, and track them with the help of a marketing planner.

More Features

Error Checker
A/B testing
Landing page builder
Reporting
Agency tools
Signup Forms

Pros

Constant Contact’s focus on small businesses means they’ve designed this email marketing platform with simplicity in mind. And they haven’t limited users’ who need more advanced email marketing automation features.

Its error checker is a good feature to catch bad links and fix issues that might lower conversion. Constant Contact is a great email marketing software for educators, event organizers, and small businesses.

Cons

Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan. Although it has simple pricing, this email marketing tool overcompensates higher-paying Plus users and leaves its Core plan users with limited functionalities.

Pricing

Constant Contact offers two paid plans to accommodate two audiences:

Getting started — $9.99 per month
Advanced features— $45 per month

However, for more advanced automation features, you’ll need the $449 per month marketing automation offer.

These paid plans come with 30-day money-back guarantees so that any small business can test-drive the tool without commitments.

5. MailChimp: Best Email Design and Marketing AI

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing software available online. It integrates email marketing automation features and creative tools to deliver result-oriented email marketing.

Unique Feature: Email marketing automation features
Target Users: Freelancers, agencies, and developers
Pricing: Starts at $11 per month

Features

1. AI-Powered Design

Mailchimp is an artificial intelligence-enabled creative assistant to automate and personalize your email and newsletter design for your businesses.

The creative assistant uses AI to study your brand and create beautiful, professional designs tailored to your needs.

These AI-powered designs are useful across multiple channels.

2. Subject Line Assistant

Your email subject lines are crucial to your campaign’s success. Barilliance reported that 64% of email recipients open messages based on the subject line.

Thinking and drafting the perfect email subject line to drive customer engagement is often difficult. But not anymore.

Mailchimp’s subject line helper provides real-time feedback and suggestions to guide you.

3. Audience Segmentation

Is your email marketing effort not yielding the desired results? You might be targeting the right audience with the wrong campaign.

Mailchimp helps to categorize your email list according to shared characteristics.

This ensures you send the right message to the right audience for better results.

4. Pre-built Templates

Create professional-looking emails and landing pages in minutes using any of over 100 template designs on Mailchimp.

Campaign templates incorporate content blocks and exciting design elements for your exploration.

5. Smart Predictions

Save yourself the cost of hiring a data analyst using available insight predictions on Mailchimp to analyze data.

Get demographic information about your past, present and prospective customers at your fingertips. These predictions help you make better decisions that affect your brand.

6. Marketing Automation Features

Automate your brand marketing workflows and drip campaigns to get the work done in just a few clicks. Set up the processes new email subscribers will go through before conversion.

Send automated welcome notes, product notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and other vital information about your brand.

7. Image and File Editor

Alter, sync, and save your images or files with Mailchimp’s robust content studio.

8. Website Builder

Create a unique search-engine optimized website with Mailchimp’s free website builder.

No special coding or website design experience is needed. Instead, get right into it with your domain name and a clear idea of what you hope to achieve.

More Features

Pop-up form
Marketing CRM
A/B testing
Analytics
Integrations
Appointment scheduler

Pros

Mailchimp is easy to use, and its creative assistant takes away the mental hassle of creating original content regularly. Apart from its free plan, this email marketing service offers unlimited contacts on its Premium plan.

Cons

The free version only allows 500 contacts, and Mailchimp’s monthly email sends are limited across all paid plans.

Pricing

Apart from MailChimp’s free plan, paid plans start from $11 per month, and the Premium plan starts is $299 per month.

6. Klaviyo: Best eCommerce Marketing Automation

Klaviyo is an eCommerce-centered email marketing platform that pools data to create workflows and enhance business growth.

Klaviyo promises users an experience, a unified database, and a learning platform guaranteed to launch their businesses to new heights.

Unique Feature: Personalized benchmarks
Target Users: eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $45 per month

Features

1. Email Marketing

Develop, personalize and automate your emails to portray your brand essence with Klaviyo.

This email marketing platform promises to help users maximize revenue, improve repeat sales, and increase customer retention using well-timed personalized email messages.

Klaviyo uses customer behaviors like these to target your messages better:

Abandoning carts
Items they ordered
Recently viewed products

And also incorporates group behaviors like these:

Bestsellers
Newest products
Most viewed products

So, whether customers appreciate group behavior or tend to repeat a behavior, Klaviyo picks up on that signal to improve your sales.

2. Precise Segmentation

Klaviyo automatically syncs customers’ data from their first interaction with your brand. Segmentation is swift, specific, and happens in real-time.

Categorize customers in similar demographics or those with shared traits together. This will ensure they get appropriate email messages guaranteed to trigger recipients.

3. In-built Signup Forms

Get to know your customers better and build your email subscriber list with pre-built forms. Klaviyo forms can be embedded in the content or pop up when visitors land on your page.

4. Professional Templates

Klaviyo provides over 100 SMS marketing and email templates to suit your brand. You don’t have to rack your brain trying to come up with authentic messages all the time. Pick expertly crafted

5. Integrations

Klaviyo lets you move data across apps without a hitch.

This email marketing solution supports over 220 platforms that cater to eCommerce functions like payments and order management.

6. Benchmarks

The eCommerce sector is highly competitive. So stay ahead of your peers. Catch market, industry, and emerging trends on time. And compare your growth with businesses selling similar products.

Benchmark helps you know where you stand in the grand scheme and what others are doing differently to achieve better results in your field.

7. SMS Chats

Scale your business with direct SMS messages to old and prospective customers.

SMS makes communication easier, faster, and less formal. So you can talk to customers around the globe on the go.

8. Broadcast Newsletter

Create the perfect newsletters about your brand and distribute them to your audience through their most preferred channel (email or SMS).

Broadcasts are one-off messages you can easily design without professional help. Klaviyo makes the process faster with send time automation.

More Features

Drag and drop email editor
A/B Testing
Multichannel attribution
Custom reporting

Pros

Klaviyo targets eCommerce brands squarely. This targeting helps users of this email marketing platform optimize for result-driven marketing automation. Users can get a free plan on this email software.

Klaviyo is feature packed and specializes in increasing revenues for businesses.

Cons

The free version has limitations. And Klaviyo allows only a few integrations compared to other email marketing service providers. So, this email marketing solution is only good if you won’t be heavy on integrations.

Pricing

Klaviyo offers a free plan for starters. After that, the email plan starts at $45 per month, and you pay $60 per month to access all the tools in the email and SMS marketing plans.

7. Campaign Monitor: Best for Transactional Emails and Autoresponders

Campaign Monitor prioritizes ease and efficiency in delivering email marketing services to businesses.

The platform assures users of helping them to create memorable emails that convert and drive engagement.

Unique Feature: Expert email marketing
Target Users: Tech brands, media agencies, marketers, and charities
Pricing: starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

As a business owner who is always on the go, creating an email from scratch is time-consuming. This email platform offers free brandable email templates.

Freely choose from the stash of professional templates and save yourself the stress and time it takes to design.

2. Custom Emails

This email platform harnesses customers’ data from your website, apps, and eCommerce tools to enable you to craft and deliver personalized emails to them.

A Campaign Monitor report shows marketers record a 20% sales increase and 26% more open rates when they send personalized campaigns.

As the best email marketing software for transactional messages and autoresponder, this tool lets you deliver personalized experiences to your customers for as low as $9.

3. Transactional Emails

Sending messages that trigger specific actions from recipients has never been easier.

This email software allows you to create, modify and enhance your communication with customers using bespoke transactional emails.

4. Actionable Analytics

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this popular email marketing service offers actionable email analytics you can access in just a few clicks. So you can rest assured of practical insights into your business performance.

Popular email marketing services like this email software gives you access to an interactive dashboard to measure results across metrics like these:

Email campaigns
Automated journeys
Transactional emails

And others.

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this email software provides actionable insights from your top-performing campaigns that you can deploy across other campaigns.

5. Email Experts

Enjoy round-the-clock professional support services from one of the best email service providers.

If you run into technical problems, you can count on Campaign Monitor’s expert team at any time. From funnel to deliverability experts, you can get all the helps you need for your email marketing campaign with this feature.

6. Email broken link review

As one of the best email marketing providers, this tool helps you find and fix broken links that might hurt your campaign efforts. The Link Review tools work in this capacity.

This tool scans your messages, flags any missing or broken links, and validates them.

Image Credit: Campaign Monitor

7. Customizable Signup Forms

A signup form is a helpful tool that persuades customers to take the extra step into your business.

Direct the ideal audience to the right section of your business with editable signup forms.

You can also add a subscribe icon on your website’s landing pages.

More Features

SMS marketing
Segmentation tools
A/B testing
Image Gallery
Campaign tags
Email broken link review
Integrations

Pros

Campaign Monitor is easy to use and offers affordable feature-loaded paid plans for all business sizes.

Cons

The SMS feature on Campaign Monitor is only available to contracted customers sending texts to the USA, and it doesn’t offer a free plan.

Pricing

Three paid plans are billed monthly with prices starting as follows:

Basic: $9 per month
Unlimited: $29 per month
Premier: $149 per month

This email service provider’s prices changes per plan as your list grows, but you can send unlimited emails on the Unlimited and Premier plans.

8. Moosend: Best Value for Unlimited Emails

If you’re looking for pocket-friendly email marketing services that deliver results, try Moosend.

Moosend is designed for small and big businesses seeking impressive emails that resonate with their audience.

You can send a limitless amount of emails to suit your business needs.

Unique Feature: Weather-based personalization and evergreen campaigns
Target Users: Saas, publishers, eCommerce, non-profit, travel, and agencies
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Whatever inspiration you have when recreating an email campaign, simply drag and drop it with Moosend’s powerful email builder.

You can also design your email campaigns with HTLM—you have full control over how MooSend works for you.

2. CRM Automation Features

Build lasting and rewarding relationships with customers by automating basic CRM functions.

Handling every customer’s need is tedious and time-consuming. But you must make each customer feel special to ensure continuous patronage.

Automate basic CRM operations and focus on bigger tasks.

3. Landing Pages

Your website landing pages help you convert visitors better—MooSend lets you create responsive and catchy landing pages to increase your site’s conversions.

4. Ready-to-use Templates

MooSend lets you save time with pre-built subscription forms, landing pages, and newsletter templates.

Simply flip, personalize and use your most preferred template from this email marketing service provider.

5. AI-Powered eCommerce

Moosend provides eCommerce email marketing solutions to users, from abandoned cart reminders to product recommendations.

Like other best email marketing services on this list, MooSend uses artificial intelligence to help your business make more sales with email.

6. Forms

Design lead-generating subscription forms for onsite visitors.

When your landing pages receive visitors, they receive your pop-up or embedded forms immediately. Information from these forms goes to segment, retarget, and drive customer engagements.

7. Integrations

You don’t have to let go of your best CRM, CMS, and eCommerce tools when moving to MooSend.

Bring your marketing tools or apps and integrate them into your MooSend account. This email service provider lets you connect your integrations without a developer’s help.

More Features

Custom reports
Site tracking
Segmentation
Product recommendation
Transactional emails

Pros

Moosend affords you access to powerful email marketing tools at a relatively cheaper rate.

Cons

The basic paid plan excludes account managers who provide expert support to users. Moosend also limits the number of email subscribers by payment plan.

Transactional emails are available to pro and enterprise subscribers, and no free plan exists.

Pricing

MooSend offers a 30-day free trial. But its pricing starts from $9 per month.

9. Omnisend: Best Email Marketing Service for Shopify

Omnisend is the best email marketing tool with eCommerce optimizations and pre-designed workflows.

This email marketing service reduces the work involved in running a thriving eCommerce business by relying on automation.

Unique Feature: eCommerce email and SMS automation
Target Users: eCommerce, startups, and SMEs
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Editor for Content Creation

Your emails and campaigns must be consistent with your brand identity and message. The drag-and-drop email content editor lets you modify in-built templates to suit you.

2. Automated Push Notifications

Attract, retarget and convert web visitors with personalized push notifications. Set automated reminders for cart or browse abandonment and transactional emails beyond just offering a basic email marketing service.

3. Audience Synchronization

Integrate contacts into your Facebook and Google for better and on-target ads. Omnisend harmonizes your contact every 5-15 minutes, keeping you up-to-date. It also supports cookie-less advertising, which is good for when Google deactivates cookies on Chrome.

4. SMS Marketing

You want to handle all your SMS and emails on a single email marketing service to keep you abreast of customer conversations.

Also, you can automate SMS by including it in your marketing workflow, so customers get timely and thoughtful messages.

Onmisend boasts a 47.7% higher conversion rate in users who combine SMS and email marketing.

5. Migration

Omnisend makes the switch to their email marketing service easy and seamless for users, specifically eCommerce brands.

As a popular email marketing service, Omnisend integrates with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

6. Hyper Segmentation

Omnisend’s intuitive segmentation helps you understand your audience better to serve them better.

Increase your sales and campaign by targeting an audience based on purchase behavior and their unique journeys on your website.

Also, monitor customer lifecycle phases to develop and execute a better retention strategy.

7. Multichannel eCommerce Marketing

Omnisend engages your eCommerce customers from different channels in one place. All your marketing activities, email campaigns, ads, and sales happen on the Omnisend platform.

You can finally keep an eye on all your important data and audience.

More Features

Live support
Forms
Campaign builder
Sales report
MMS

Pros

Omnisend is purpose-built for eCommerce businesses and integrated with 100+ eCommerce stores like Shopify and wooCommerce. So, you only need one click to start your eCommerce journey.

Plus, you can start exploring this email marketing software on a free plan.

Cons

Omnisend targets eCommerce users and offers limited features for other industries. But you can use the free plan to test drive it.

Pricing

The free plan is available for 250 contacts, but you can upgrade to paid plan starting at $16 per month to enjoy premium offerings.

10. Mailerlite: Best for Email Campaign Tracking

Mailerlite is an affordable email marketing service that offers growth-focused email solutions to customers.

It integrates your e-store with most email marketing tools to increase conversion. Mailerlite also incorporates ultra-tracking technology to deliver the most accurate insights on your marketing campaigns.

Unique Feature: Auto resend campaign
Target Users: Marketers, writers, publishers, eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Newsletter Editor

Newsletters are a great way to keep customers informed and updated about your product and services. Create outstanding newsletters from scratch or touch up existing beautiful designs.

2. Website Designer

Every business needs a responsive and attractive website where prospective customers can interact with their brands—most email signups happen on your website anyway.

Utilize Mailerlite’s drag-and-drop website builder to design your business’s lively and engaging website layout.

3. Email Automation Features

Image Credit: Mailerlite

Monitor email clicks, customer behavior, and response to your emails to enable you to strategize. Automated emails handle follow-ups, email resends, and action prompts based on analyzed data.

4. Email Verifier

Mailerlite performs routine checks and deep cleaning on your email list to weed out inactive subscribers, dormant accounts, and spammy contacts.

Enjoy a fully optimized email list 24/7.

5. Blog Creator

Use its drag-and-drop builder to craft attention-grabbing blog posts to build your audience and share your unique ideas with your community.

Blogs are an important marketing strategy to adopt for your business. According to statistics, 77% of internet users read blogs.

Leverage the power of blogs and increase your site clicks.

6. Landing Page Gallery

Your prospective customers need an online location to interact with your business. This could be a landing page.

Choose from a range of templates for a mobile-friendly landing page. So you have one less thing to worry about in building your email marketing campaign.

7. Digital Products Marketing

Mailerlite offers an avenue for users to sell virtual products like ebooks, online courses, or other digital services.

Set up websites and include a payment gateway for easy patronage.

You can equally promote your digital products on Mailerlite.

More Features

Signup forms
Email automation
Newsletter subscription
Analytics and tracking
Facebook integrations

Pros

Mailerlite is simplified for even beginners to understand. Also, the email marketing service integrates with Shopify.

Pricing is fair, and you can enjoy up to 30 days free trial period for all paid plans to decide if you want to continue or not.

Cons

The free version is only open to one user and has limited functions and features.

Pricing

Free for up to 1000 subscribers. Monthly billing based on their annual plan:

Growing Business: $9 per month
Advanced: $19 per month
Enterprise: Custom pricing

11. ConvertKit: Best for Creators

ConvertKit targets creators and builds its features around their needs to attract, engage and monetize their audience. As a result, users can build, manage, and earn a living from your audience on a single platform.

Unique Feature: Creator pro
Target Users: Creators (authors, musicians, coaches)
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Automated Email Marketing

ConvertKit lets you breeze through the email writing process by automating every stage. For example, schedule email sends, deliver welcome messages, and group subscribers automatically.

2. Advanced Creator

ConvertKit’s creator pro takes the creator business a notch higher. This feature allows subscriber scoring, newsletter referrals, timely support, and teamwork and provides deliverability reports.

This is the best email marketing tool for mainstream creators.

3. Email Design

Create, edit, and optimize your emails to convert faster. ConvertKit makes email designing easy and more fun.

You can choose from previous templates and flawlessly modify the font, color, or body of your emails.

4. Email Opt-In Forms

Whether you want to choose from numerous form templates or create a customized form yourself, ConvertKit got you covered.

Access free signup forms to retarget your audience.

5. Commerce

Turn your passion into a source of income with ConvertKit’s eCommerce channel, which enables you to sell or buy digital products easily.

Package and monetize your knowledge as ebooks, online courses, newsletters, music, or presets and sell to a willing audience.

6. Third-party Integrations

Integrate your ConvertKit to your most preferred third-party apps. You can access eCommerce, lead capture, ads, CRM, and many other third-party integrations.

7. Paid Newsletter

If you have rich content and a list of loyal readers who enjoy them, ConvertKit can help you earn from newsletters.

Create customized newsletters targeted at the right audience and put a price on your knowledge.

Mailerlite provides free newsletter templates.

More Features

Audience tag
Advanced Reporting
Community support
Broadcasts
Automation builder

Pros

ConvertKit promotes the creator business and is positioned to help creatives sell their products.

The free plan supports 300 subscribers with unlimited emails, forms, landing pages, and other email marketing features.

What’s more?

You get two months of free email marketing services when you opt for annual billing.

Cons

Features on ConvertKit are purpose-built specifically for creatives making the email marketing service a poor choice for other industries.

Migration to ConvertKit from any other email marketing tool is unavailable on the free version. Also, the creator plan only allows for a single team member addition.

Pricing

Free for up to 300 subscribers. Monthly billing begins at $9 per month for Creator and $25 per month for Creator Pro.

12. Sendy: Best Low Budget and Self-Hosted Solution

Sendy uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to deliver the best email marketing software for users who would like a solution that’s 100x cheaper than competitors.

Sendy is one of the most affordable email marketing services in the market.

Users don’t need to pay monthly subscriptions as this self-hosted email marketing service bills only the number of emails sent. However, you’ll need to buy, install, and update the Sendy email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Low-budget email sends
Target Users: eCommerce, SMEs
Pricing: Pay as you use

Features

1. Cheap Email Sends

Sendy offers the lowest low-price email send rate in the market. For example, you pay only $1 for every 10,000 email messages.

The affordability doesn’t affect deliverability and speed as it uses the widely trusted Amazon SES. So, you can achieve your email marketing goals on a low budget.

2. Email Campaign Reports

Get timely reports on your campaign performance and other marketing activities on the platform.

Reports give updated insights on your site activities to help you focus your energy on marketing efforts that produce the most results.

Reports are organized into beautiful visual representations like charts to simplify data.

3. Autoresponders

You can’t determine when customers will visit your site or indicate interest in your product.

But with auto response in place, you can rest assured that you’ll miss nothing.

Follow up on email subscribers without being present around the clock. Set marketing automation to answer inquiries, provide feedback, and engage customers while you’re away.

4. Email Clean Up

Sendy’s Housekeeping ensures your email list stays clean and relevant so you can channel your marketing efforts to the right audience.

Prune out redundant contacts, uninterested subscribers, and wrong email addresses, clogging your sales progress wheel.

5. Integrations and Zapier

Image Credit: Sendy

Explore many third-party apps like WordPress and thousands of marketing tools on Zapier by integrating Sendy with them.

The integration process is easy, but if you need expert support, the Sendy community is there to assist you at no cost. However, Sendy may charge a fee if you need them to help you install their email marketing software on your hosting server

6. Personalized Domains and Brands

Create your branded domain to increase brand awareness and customer trust. Let your URL capture your brand.

7. Personalized Fields

Save information about your subscribers on your created custom field. Stored data ranges from names to emails and demography.

Information from Sendy’s custom fields is useful in segmentation and audience tags when designing newsletters.

More Features

Subscription forms
Subscriber segmentation
Webhooks
Google Analytics integration
Personalized tags

Pros

Sendy is feature-rich for a low-budget email marketing platform.

Users only pay for emails sent. And the one-time fee required to use Sendy is refundable if you don’t get desired results—but this is case-by-case.

You can install Sendy on one domain but host emails for multiple domain names.

Cons

Sendy runs on your web server and requires a license to set up. Requires updating to newer versions from time to time. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t support a free plan.

Pricing

No monthly payment plan.

One-off $69 is to buy this email marketing software
Pay $1 for every 10,000 emails sent.

FAQs

What is the best email marketing software to choose?

Choosing an email marketing platform is tough. But you can make it slightly easier with a checklist.

Use this checklist to make your decision easier:

Understand the nature and purpose of the emails you intend to send.
Decide on the most important features your ideal email marketing software must possess.
Prepare your testing team
Develop a shortlist of productive apps.
Carefully assess each shortlisted app with your team.
Start exploring any free email marketing service you can access.

What are the categories of marketing emails?

Email Newsletters: they’re newsletters that contain vital brand information.
Transactional Emails: facilitates or updates commercial transactions, e.g., order confirmation email.
Behavioral Emails: on-target messages based on user behavior to previous messages on your site or third-party tracking sources.

What is B2B email marketing service?

B2B email marketing involves sending messages and email campaigns to businesses rather than individuals.

In a B2B marketing scenario, the communication link is between your business and another business.

Your targeting, product, and marketing activities are channeled toward converting other businesses to loyal customers.

How often should you send out marketing emails?

Frequent emails can turn customers off and make them unsubscribe from your list quickly. Ideally, you should drastically increase emails from twice monthly to once weekly.

Research shows that 33.3% of businesses send out emails weekly.

Whatever you decide, ensure to analyze progress reports and use insight to determine whether to increase or reduce the number of emails sent.

What is the importance of email marketing?

Email marketing helps businesses gather, manage and engage new site visitors. You can also keep existing customers updated on your latest offerings.

It costs 500% more to gain new customers than to retain an existing one. So, use email marketing to keep your loyal customers engaged.

What is the average ROI for email marketing?

Email marketing gives a significantly higher return than other types of marketing, like digital or traditional marketing.

You gain $42 per $1 invested in email marketing campaigns. This makes email marketing the most preferred digital marketing strategy for businesses.

Does email marketing increase sales?

Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective approach to marketing across different industries.

Consumers who receive email offers are 138% more likely to patronize a business because of email marketing campaigns than those who don’t.

Hence, email marketing increases sales, lead generation, and overall brand engagement.

Summary

The email marketing space is rife with email marketing services built to meet different user needs.

So, choosing the right email marketing service from the pool of options can be tasking.

But we’ve highlighted the top email marketing services and features you should consider when migrating your email service to a different platform. Of course, Active Campaign would be the best email marketing service on this list if we must choose one.

Explore any of the best email marketing software mentioned above, and let us know if you need help.

Featured image by storyset on Freepik

The post 12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

12 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

How to Measure Live Chat Performance

Live chat is one of the most powerful tools for customer experience in the current marketplace.

In a world where customers are constantly connected to the online world, online chat is a reliable way of getting quick solutions to common problems.

Today’s consumers prefer talking to an agent over chat to calling a contact center, and they often feel that live chat is less frustrating than waiting for the right person to answer the phone.

Of course, like any digital tool, live chat is only effective when using it correctly. Today, we’re going to show you the crucial KPIs you need to consider if you want to ensure that your chat strategy is delivering a tangible return on investment.

The Most Important Metrics to Measure for Live Chat

These days, implementing live chat tools is easier than ever.

You don’t necessarily need to hire a professional developer unless you want a specialist widget with specific functions and unique branding. Many plugins and tools for sites built on Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to instantly access chat functions.

However, just because implementing live chat is easy doesn’t mean that there aren’t countless ways for your strategy to go wrong. Keeping an eye on these crucial KPIs and metrics ensures you’re making the right impression with your chat strategy.

1. First Response Time

First response time is a crucial live chat metric. This measures how long customers need to wait before someone responds to them. Technically, this metric only refers to how quickly an actual agent responds to your customer, so automated “thanks for getting in touch” messages don’t count. However, immediately responding with one of those messages can convince your audience to stick around for a little longer.

The faster your agents can respond to messages and solve problems, the better your brand reputation becomes. The good news is that a good live chat strategy can lead to pretty quick response times. The average time for an agent to see a live chat message is around 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

To improve your FRT statistics, make sure you:

Invest in chatbots: AI chatbots can support customers 24/7 with handy, self-service functionality. These tools will also filter out the customers waiting for an agent who can find a solution to their problem on your FAQ page.
Prepare canned responses: Quick responses to common queries can help you to address a problem much faster. In addition, preparing canned responses will ensure that your team members can quickly respond to more customers.
Increase your resources: Ensure you have the right hand and enough agents to handle peak demand.

2. Average Resolution Time

The first response rate only looks at how quickly someone responds to a customer’s message for the first time. However, it doesn’t show how rapidly you deal with client problems. Average Resolution Time is the metric that helps to measure customer satisfaction by seeing how long it takes to get to a point where your customer can close the chat.

If it takes too long for your employees to solve problems, there’s an increased risk of your customers becoming annoyed and frustrated. Additionally, the longer agents take dealing with each individual chat, the more other consumers will have to wait for someone to become available. Finally, the longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more customer satisfaction decreases.

The key to success is ensuring that the right agent deals with the correct customer and that everyone on your team is empowered with the appropriate tools and information. Boost resolution time by:

Giving customers a quick self-service solution: For common questions, make sure that you have an FAQ section that you can direct your customers to. In addition, a chatbot that can offer quick canned responses to regular queries can save time. Plus, they’re great for reducing the pressure on your agents’ shoulders.
Integrate CRM tools with live chat: Make sure your agents have access to information about each customer as soon as they start the conversation. This information should include the customer’s name, what they’ve purchased before, and if they’ve issued any support tickets. Integrating with the CRM makes it easier for agents to jump straight into the action without needing the customer to explain everything first.
Keep resources handy: Your team members should have instant access to all the information they need to answer customer questions. Ensure that searchable data repositories are available for everyone on your live chat team.

Remember, routing tools that automatically send customers to the agent with the proper knowledge or skills will also improve response times and reduce the number of times a customer needs to repeat themselves.

3. Chat to Conversion Rate

Live chat tools aren’t just an avenue for problem resolution. Although customers can get excellent service through live chat, they also look to chat to collect information before a potential purchase. Around 38% of customers say that they end up purchasing a positive live chat experience.

The live chat app on your website can provide real-time assistance for sales queries, converting leads, and maximizing your return on investment. However, to determine how successful your chat system is at encouraging sales, you must look at the chat to conversion rate metric.

Essentially, you measure the number of chats your company has been involved in, then compare that number to the total number of conversions from those customers. It might be helpful to narrow down your results here by using your data and analytics tools to separate your total number of live chats into those intended for sales information and those requiring assistance.

If your chat to conversion rate isn’t as high as you would like, there are lots of things you can do to start making a positive impact:

Automatically launch a chat: As soon as someone comes to your website, launch a chat window with a bot that asks whether you can help your customer. You can even include a list of commonly asked questions so your customer can get help faster.
Follow up on chat conversations: Make sure you follow up on any questions that customers ask on your chat widget with an email. This is a great way to reach out to customers that may have been distracted and ended up abandoning their cart.
Personalize suggestions: Use AI insights and information from your customer management tools to determine which products are most likely to appeal to each customer, then suggest those items. Remember to ensure that your tone of voice in the chat matches your brand too.

Remember, the faster you can answer customer queries and address their concerns with your live chat strategy, the more likely the chat will lead to a sale. Ultimately, customers are convinced to purchase when they believe they can trust your business to deliver excellent experiences.

4. Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score is probably one of the most critical metrics in any customer experience strategy. It directly measures customer satisfaction levels and gives you an insight into how well you’re doing from the perspective of your target audience.

The best way to measure CSAT through live chat is to add a survey to the end of the chat session. For instance, you could ask, “How would you rate this session on a scale of 1 to 10”. Then, based on the score, you’d calculate a “Net Promotion Score.” Each score falls into one of three categories: “Detractors 0-6”, “Passives 6-8,” and “Promotors 9-10”.

The more information you collect about your CSAT score, the easier it will be to determine where you’re going wrong with your live chat strategy. On the other hand, if the score is pretty good after a chat session, you’re probably on the right track. To improve your overall score:

Encourage feedback: Getting people to leave feedback, even on a live chat app, can be difficult. Offering customers the chance to win something in exchange for their insights could help you to get more data.
Follow up: Connect with your “detractors” to find out what you did wrong. Follow up in the live chat session by asking if they’d like to leave a more comprehensive review. Alternatively, you can send an email asking for additional information.
Reach out to promotors: Connect with the people who give you the most favorable scores to ask them for their insights. Find out what they enjoyed most about the experience and request a review that you can place on your website for social proof.

5. Missed Opportunities

The longer someone waits for you to answer their question in a live chat or respond to their initial message, the more likely they’ll give up on the conversation. Unfortunately, this means that your company ends up with missed opportunities. You lose the chance to potentially make a sale, delight a customer, and strengthen your brand reputation.

While you might assume that your customers will know you can’t be available to answer all of their questions immediately, that’s not the case. INC tells us that 51% of consumers believe a business should always be open. So every missed chat is another negative mark against your reputation.

If you discover that your team is missing a lot of chat chances, this could be a sign that you don’t have enough resources available in this area. However, there are a few ways that you can reduce your chances of missed opportunities, such as:

Hiring more team members: If you know that there are times of the year or week when you have peaks in demand, ensure that you have the correct number of staff members available.
Using chatbots: Chatbots won’t be able to answer all customer questions, but they can deliver quick responses to commonly asked queries and reduce the risk of lost opportunities.
Provide alternative forms of communication: if your customer can’t reach you on live chat, make sure that there are other options available, like a phone number and email address or a form where your customer can automatically submit a ticket.

6. Total Number of Chats and Tickets

Keeping track of the total number of tickets your customers submit, alongside the number of chats your employees engage in, will give you helpful information. First, the total number of conversations shows how many customers are taking advantage of your live chat function on the website.

You’ll also be able to compare your total number of chats to the number of resolved problems you deal with for your customers. For example, comparing your total number of chats to an unlimited number of tickets shows you how many customers have been left to rely on other sources of communication. You can also see how good your employees are at following up with tickets issued by customers.

When you’re analyzing your number of tickets and chat sessions, you might notice that many of the queries you dealt with were connected to specific questions or topics. If that’s the case, you might be able to create a new FAQ page for your customers or provide your chatbot with extra information that it can use.

If you’re getting more support tickets through alternative means than live chat, it might be time to ask yourself what’s wrong with your live chat performance and why your customers choose not to use it.

Improving Live Chat CX for Your Business

Live chat can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience and an excellent way to strengthen your relationship with existing and potential clients.

Step into the shoes of your customer and discover what it feels like to walk through the whole live chat experience, from the moment that you send a request to the live chat team to the moment when you close down the chat with a solution to your problem. Other quick tips include:

Getting the software right: Make sure your live chat app is easy for your end customers and your employees. The chat app you use should be convenient and suit your brand. It also needs to collect information effectively without causing problems like GDPR and regulations. Get a developer involved if you think you have a problem with your chat functionality.
Guide your team: Remember that your team needs to know how to use the live chat tools available effectively if they’re going to deliver the best results to your customers. Make sure you give your employees scripts to deal with problems if needed. In addition, chatbots that can quickly grab information from integrated CRM tools and other solutions could make your agents’ lives much more manageable.
Pay attention to feedback: Ask your customers for feedback on their live chat experiences whenever you can. Ensure you pay attention to what they say they like and dislike about the encounter. If you can listen to your customer’s opinions, they’ll give you a lot of helpful information to work with when you’re enhancing and optimizing your live chat strategy. In addition, listening to your audience shows that you have their best interests at heart.

Remember, as well as customer feedback; you might be able to ask your employees for their insights into how you can improve live chat performance too. Employees also work with these tools regularly, so they know which features are more problematic than others.

Measuring and Improving Live Chat

Live chat functionality isn’t something that you implement into your website and forget about. Instead, like any form of customer service or engagement tool, your live chat solution should be something you test regularly and constantly update to suit your customers’ needs.

Knowing which metrics to measure when examining live chat functionality and performance will boost the experience you can give your audience and even open the door for better relationships with clients in the long term.

The post How to Measure Live Chat Performance first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

12 août 2022/par Service comm.

The Complete Guide To Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is when you attune your marketing efforts based on customer data. This data can be anything from the first and last name to purchase intent, concerns, and history.

Personalized marketing has revolutionized the way businesses market their product and service to their audience. It brings value to people’s lives, spiking the sales graph for brands and businesses. So it’s a win-win situation for both the company and the consumer.

Even big companies do this for their campaigns. They do so because it gives them great results and ROI for their marketing initiatives. If these multinational businesses do this, it’s a good idea to incorporate this strategy and learn from a top resource on digital marketing.

This article aims to explain every nook and cranny of personalized marketing. By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know the impact of personalized marketing on our lives. And how you can integrate this into your marketing strategy to benefit your business.

What Is Personalized Marketing?

Have you ever encountered a business that knows what you’re going through? Or did you see an ad online that you closely relate to? Chances are, you were one of the target markets of those marketing materials. And if you could associate yourself with the ad, their marketing strategy worked.

That is what personalized marketing does to your audience, market, or particular demographic. This style of advertising leverages personalization in your marketing materials. The details of your marketing content are tailored to a specific audience and address the issues or real-time problems of a particular segment in your market.

Personalized marketing has become popular because more people demand it from businesses. Once the people have experienced what it felt like, they want to feel more of it.

To objectively see the demand for personalization, here are some statistics to back it up.

Accenture reported that 91% of consumers are likelier to shop with businesses that offer them relevant content. This shows that the right product recommendations can increase the chances of shopping with you.

Salesforce mentioned that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs. This statement proves that a generalized way of marketing isn’t as effective as before. The consumer mindset has already developed, and they demand more personalization from businesses.

A striking piece of data from Statista showed that 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing. If that figure is accurate, almost all businesses should start incorporating this into their strategies. There’s no reason for them not to try this out.

Given the high positive demand for personalized marketing, it’s no secret why more and more businesses are doing this. However, not every company out there is doing this right. A wrong way of doing this can bring a loss of clients and a negative ROI.

To help you go on the right track of using personalization in your marketing, read up on the next section of this article.

Know These 6 Tips To Correctly Do Personalized Marketing

You’d agree that knowing your customer’s first and last name is essential. But with the dynamically changing strategies, personalized marketing is going beyond that. It’s actually about understanding what your targeted consumers need, merging with a way to convey the message that your business is the solution.

To help you achieve this, take note of the things below:

1. Leverage Your Customer Data

The foundation of personalized marketing is laid on customer data. The best marketing professionals and strategists emphasize gathering relevant data if you want to scale. Excellent digital marketing courses will teach you that customer data will help you build a solid foundation for your content and campaigns.

Consumer behavior has always been the most important detail for target marketing. With every click, it has become easier to gather data about individual customers, their interests, hobbies, purchase history, buying behavior, and more.

You’ll be able to get this information if you’ve practiced data management and collecting customer data throughout the years of your operation. However, it’s not too late to begin if you haven’t started with this yet. There is a lot of marketing automation software that aids marketing teams in doing this. For example, many businesses use lead scoring software to gain insight into their clients’ needs and categorize them appropriately.

For your personalization efforts, you can use questionnaires, surveys, and feedback forms to capture personal data on the internet. A customer will happily fill out a survey form if a reward in return entices him. This reward can be in any form– a voucher, a first buy discount, free shipping, or more.

This initiative will help you get more data in a shorter time frame.

2. Understand Your Customer’s Needs

Hoarding data will be a complete waste of marketing efforts, capital, and efficiency if you do not extract consumer behavior from it. When you have access to a rich set of data, you have the privilege to understand your customers’ trending needs deeply. After gaining insights from the data, create a marketing strategy based on those findings to target your audience.

Doing this doesn’t just apply to B2C; it also works for B2B companies, which is why the demand for custom software development, tailored services, personalized packages, and B2B data providers have been on the rise in these recent years.

It is a two-way road. While you are on the lookout for your target market, at the same time, the customers expect businesses to know what they need. The market you’re currently serving expects you to know what products or services are fit for them.

So this is where it gets crucial: you have to dig deeper into your niche and find the specs of your audience’s needs. Having a general idea about the needs of your target audience and personalized marketing usually don’t go harmoniously.

Planning a better-personalized marketing strategy will not be a piece of cake but will be much more rewarding for every aspect of your business. May it be sales, return on investments, customer relationships, or personalized marketing campaigns.

3. Personalize Every Stage Of The Customer Journey

The first rule of business is convincing the customer that you are their best friend. Now that you know what they want, you pledge to provide them with whatever best you can. Limiting personalization to marketing is not the solution. You have to be vigilant in meeting these individual requirements at every stage. And remember that consistency is the name of the game. That is how you bring your business into the running.

You can integrate CRM automation, email marketing tools and deploy other content marketing strategies to help make this process a lot simpler. Personalized live chat and chatbots, such as those offered by ThriveDesk, allow businesses to personalize their offerings and build their brand reputation.

As a customer, my requirement would be reading content, browsing, and experiencing products that would hit home. A personalized experience is what every consumer demands. And this is what makes them want to go back and do business with you again.

By creating helpful and relevant content, recommending the right products to them, and giving out convenient payment options, you are setting your business apart from the rest. Doing this allows you to have personalized every touchpoint that your customers do with your business.

4. Present In An Engaging Way

Consider customer engagement as absolutely necessary. Having the best data set and knowing what your customers want is not enough. In the competitive space of business and marketing, everyone is trying to get the attention of one another. And this is what you are supposed to do. This helps in building consumer-brand relations.

When a consumer engages, meaningful things happen. Engaging content pushes the consumer through the funnel and hence promotes conversions. Your content should be creative and eye-catching.

Engaging content blended with personalization boosts the brand experience. Increased loyalty, trust-building, and improved customer experience enhance the conversion and sales speed.

A great way to use personalization in an engaging manner that most businesses overlook would be through exit-intent popups.

5. Be Where Your Customers Are

This is an element that some businesses miss out on. They have created excellent social media marketing content but only distributed it on the wrong channel. For personalized marketing to be effective, it needs to be seen by people.

Are you questioning your marketing techniques because all you see is stagnancy? You have set up an engaging online store on Shopify or Wix, collected all the relevant data, your content is engaging enough, and your marketing strategy is top-notch. But you are still unable to reach your clientele.

You start wondering what you are missing out on. Your content and your strategies will not be prolific if you are on the wrong channel. Remember: the message of your content has to reach the right people for it to be effective.

Should you be on social media? If so, which one? Do you get more traction with email campaigns? Or do you have more engagements on forums?

Find out where your market is, then spend your focus there. Now the next step is how to know where they spend most of their time?

This is where we go back in the loop. And hence we again emphasize that data collection is the foundation of any great marketing strategy.

6. Improve Marketing Content

Don’t rest on your laurels when you’ve gotten everything down to a tee and have attained your desired marketing analytics behind your personalized marketing content. Always think of ways how you can improve.

Evolving at every step will keep you in the running. Don’t be misguided into thinking that your work is done if you feel like you have reached the pinnacle. Keep looking for ways to get better. Set bigger goals and status for your business.

Always go back to the drawing board and brainstorm with your team on how you can change and strive with the dynamically changing world and mindsets. In the end, all you want is to build better relationships with your customers, new and existing.

For enhanced productivity, your marketing team should always look for new strategies. This is how fresh and great marketing ideas are made.

See How You Can Benefit From Personalized Marketing

Irrelevant information can waste energy and time for both customers and the business. Personalized marketing hits the bull’s eye 99% of the time. It brings immeasurable value to the company as well as the customer.

Here are some of the top benefits of personalized marketing:

1. Better Engagement

The first target personalized marketing aims at is grabbing an individual’s attention. And this results in better engagement eventually. If you are presenting your customer with something that wows them, needless to say, it will grab their attention.

This will help bridge the gap between your customer and your brand. Identifying customers’ needs and then giving them what they want will help improve customer interaction with your brand.

It can even be enough for them to follow your call to action. The next thing you know, they will be checking your website, signing up for a list, or even purchasing a product right then and there.

2. Higher Conversions

Are you there for your customer at the right time and place? One-on-one marketing provides easy solutions to customers because you hit them with just what they are looking for at the right time.

When potential customers realize that you understand what they’re going through and provide the solution, most won’t hesitate to try your business out.

Personalization isn’t just focused on content. It can also be integrated into your processes. This results in aiding the increase of higher conversion rates.

3. Improved Customer Experience

Offering personalization will significantly improve the user experience. Once you provide the products, services, and content that meet their needs, their opinion of your business automatically improves.

Considering the statistics about personalized experiences, it is evident that consumers demand personalization strategies from companies. And if you offer such an experience, you increase the chance of making them do more business with you. Personalization helps businesses in reducing cart abandonment rates, better customer journey, increased customer satisfaction, and many more.

4. Customer Retention

Retaining persisting customers is equally important to your business as bringing new ones. Most businesses face low customer retention. It’s also a factor that some companies overlook. You must understand that it’s not all about converting prospects into paying customers. Your focus should also be on retaining those customers to make them loyal advocates of your brand.

One of the major benefits of consistent personalization is an improved customer retention rate. Consumers tend to stay with a business that understands their needs and provides solutions to their problems.

Once you can transfer a customer to a loyal advocate, you can also receive a ton of benefits. These are people that are going to defend your brand from critics. These are the same people who will give you free marketing via word of mouth and positive reviews.

5. Better Customer Relationships

Personalized experience leads to customer retention, eventually building better relationships with your nurtured customers. These entities are connected in a loop.

Customer relationships are an aspect of business that significantly helps with scalability and higher revenue. So connecting with your customers and building a relationship with them is as important as the product you are selling. This is why strengthening customer relationships should be a top priority for businesses.

Personalization makes you an expert on your target market trends. You get to know your audience deeper, which helps you build a foundation for creating a great customer relationship. And this requires marketing and customer experience teams to work together in a symphony.

For this, you can use team collaboration software which aids in the optimization of content and your approach toward the market. You’ll have a better strategy in getting their attention, providing what they want, and recommending things they’ll be interested in.

All of these things help in building customer rapport. When a customer feels that you treat them as more than just a paying customer, their customer loyalty goes to your business.

Best Examples Personalization Marketing

To inspire you to integrate this marketing strategy into your operations, below are different personalization marketing campaigns done exceptionally by various businesses. Grab inspiration, ideas, and motivation from these examples.

1. Coca-Cola

We all know the most basic form of personalization is addressing your customers’ names, but Coca-Cola took this simple idea into a massive global campaign. Their “Share a Coke” campaign started in 2011, wherein they printed different popular names on their Coke bottles and cans.

It seemed like a regular campaign at first, but it started getting traction as more customers wanted to get the name of their family, friends, and themselves. Coca-Cola said the campaign’s purpose was “to create a more personal relationship with consumers and inspire shared moments of happiness.”

The soft drinks giant used personalization and tied such a strategy with its mission: to bring memories and happiness to its consumers. You, too, can do the same – combine your mission and personalization strategy to create a unique campaign.

2. Spotify

Spotify leverages user data in its marketing strategy. They have several campaigns that make users want to use their application more often because it gives out a more tailored experience.

Other than their year-end campaign( #spotifywrapped), where they show the most played songs and podcasts their users listen to (which was a viral hit), they now also have an #OnlyYou campaign that shows your unique listening taste partnered with a musical astrology reading.

3. Nike

Nike has consistently been recognized for authentic, personalized, and heartfelt ad campaigns. This personalization always makes them capture an audience who can relate and those who start connecting to the brand. So Nike isn’t new to personalization. Their aim is robust community engagement.

Their highly inspirational campaigns with real-life heroes induce inspiration in their audience. Nike is great at converting people because of its excellent storytelling ability while adding personalization to the mix.

Nike’s just launched a new app that offers personalized content and rewards for committed fans. They tackle challenges and issues head-on, but they always make their marketing messages relatable to their audience. That is why they “just do it.”

Conclusion

Personalized marketing is the secret sauce to thriving businesses in the world today. However, incorporating this marketing strategy and finding success is not as simple as you might think. You will face challenges, but with enough perseverance and brainstorming, you can surpass them and successfully create a great campaign.

Remember, this marketing approach can be a hit or a miss. The first step to making it a success is relevant data collection followed by judicious implementation. This isn’t an overnight activity that you can do. It requires months of diligence in the right direction with the proper guidance. And you can gain valuable insights into this guidance via the content marketing strategies outlined in this article. But remember, once you start rolling, there is no looking back.

The post The Complete Guide To Personalized Marketing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

29 juin 2022/par Service comm.

How to Install OroCRM on Ubuntu 20.04

OroCRM is a customer relationship management software. It is a simple and low-cost CRM system ideal for small and medium-sized enterprises.

OroCRM is an integrated CRM, marketing automation, and live chat platform that helps marketers build genuine relationships with their prospects and customers. It has all the features to create, manage, measure, and optimize customer journeys. OroCRM streamlines the management of large amounts of data to provide accurate insights for better decision-making.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

8 février 2022/par Service comm.

What’s the Difference Between Good UI and Good UX?

User Experience (UX) design and User Interface (UI) design are two terms people sometimes mistakenly use interchangeably. While aspects of each are interconnected, there are distinct differences between UI/UX design.

According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 1.9 billion websites, but not all are active at the same time. No matter how you slice it, there’s a lot of competition to grab and keep user attention. Good UX is just part of the equation. For a genuinely stellar site, you must also offer an excellent interface.

Learning the ins and outs of good UI and UX requires a bit of knowledge of how the two differ and what works. Although they weave in and out of the same design, they are different.

What Is the Biggest Difference Between Good UX and UI?

UI is the functionality of the design and what users see. How do they interact with various elements? UX is more the way things come together — both visual and interactive features — to create a feel for the user. You can certainly see why people confuse the two as they both apply to interacting with a website or app.

Top design firms often have team members specializing in each discipline. However, UX designers are also aware of UI, and UI designers are also mindful of UX. How can you ensure you’re offering excellent UI/UX design while covering the full spectrum of requirements for each?

Ensuring Effective UX Design

Good UX design increases conversion rates by 400% or more. The site visitor walks away feeling understood and not frustrated. What are some of the most important aspects of good UX design?

1. Create a Good Structure

What is the hierarchy of your site? What is the first thing the user sees when they pull it up? How do they navigate from one page to the next? A well-designed website classifies different aspects of the page, and new content naturally falls into the appropriate category as it grows.

When creating a structure for your site, think about how it might expand in the next five years. You want the hierarchy to work from day one, but you also want to think through significant shifts in the content you might see down the road.

Even your navigational hierarchy should accommodate new areas easily. Plan for the unexpected, so you know how to work it into the overall design when you must.

2. Choose Beautiful Aesthetics

You have a few seconds to make an excellent impression on your site visitors. Take the time to make sure your design functions and is visually appealing. Your color palette should work, images should be crisp and relevant, and typography should be readable and engaging.

Step back from your computer and look at your design from a distance. Does anything stand out that isn’t pleasing to the eye? Get feedback from visitors about what they like and dislike. Since the focus is on user experience, your best source of constructive criticism is from your target audience. Listen to their concerns and ideas.

3. Communicate With Site Visitors

Most experts agree that users want an element of interactivity on sites and apps. People want to know you hear them and get a response. Some ideas include adding a live chat option to your site or engaging in SMS customer support.

Put yourself in their shoes. A customer may visit your site for the first time, having never heard of your brand. They have no reason to trust you or that you’ll follow through on your promises. Potential leads may have a few questions before parting with their hard-earned dollars.

Adding various ways to communicate shows them you’ll be there should they have a problem. It’s much easier to trust a company when you know you can phone, engage in live chat or shoot off an email and get an almost immediate response.

4. Add Clear Direction

Excellent UX is intuitive. You should add calls to action (CTAs) and images pointing the user where they should go next. You can use graphics of arrows, people looking or pointing toward the next step, words, or CTA buttons.

Get feedback on how clear the directions are and tweak them as needed. The user should never have to stop and ponder what to do next. Everything on the page should guide them toward the ultimate goal.

5. Break Down Complex Data

Every industry has complicated data that is difficult for non-experts to understand. Part of good UX is breaking down complex information and sharing it in a simplified way.

One example might be the registration process. Instead of just showing text, a good UX designer would number the steps. Visualizations help add to understanding.

Embracing Effective UI Design

User Interface impacts UX and involves how the design works. The UI designer thinks through visitor expectations and then creates an interface that isn’t frustrating. UI works within the framework of a website to develop functional features. User experience isn’t the complete focus of UI, but it does tie into the planning phases. What are some elements of good UI design?

1. Set Standards

For a design to have good UI, it must perform as expected. Have you ever clicked on a button, and nothing happened? Determine how you want things to work and the minimum acceptable standards for your site.

For example, what happens when someone clicks on a link or button? How does the user know their action created the expected result? Consistency is crucial to how a site performs.

2. Choose the Right Colors

While UX designers look at the emotional impact of various colors, UI designers look at whether the shades match branding and how well the different ones contrast for readability and usability. UI/UX design often bridges a single designer’s work, so the employee ensures everything works as intended, both emotionally and functionally.

You may work with another designer to make the site aesthetically pleasing while also tapping into the emotions driving users. For example, some people love blue, so a blue button can have positive results.

UX and UI designers utilize split testing to see which users respond best to. Then, make adjustments as indicated by how site visitors respond.

3. Focus on Cognitive Matters

According to the Interaction Design Foundation, people can only retain around five things in their short-term memory. Designers should work with recognition instead, as users tend to rely on cues to find what they need.

UI designers may develop an intuitive navigation system and then use the same cues on every page, such as placement, color, and language. Users can then recognize the system without having to memorize it.

4. Prevent Errors

Your job is to ensure errors are kept to a minimum when designing a website or app. One of the most significant parts of a designer’s job is testing and retesting.

Think about all the potential problems a user might run into, such as broken links, images not showing, or incomplete actions. How can you keep those problems from occurring in the first place?

Error prevention is particularly vital when designing software as a service (SaaS) or apps. Users grow frustrated quickly and will find another solution rather than troubleshooting an issue. You’re much better off avoiding the error in the first place.

How Do UX and UI Work Together?

You’ve likely already figured out how closely UX and UI entwine to create a usable experience. The UX designer pays attention to function and interactivity, and the UI designer thinks through how the interface looks.

UX pays attention to the flow of the website and where users start, go next and end up. On the other end, UI figures out how the elements look to the viewer and where everything is placed.

The UX team may decide to add an extra button to the page. The UI team must determine where to place it, if any sizing needs must occur, and how it impacts usability on desktop and mobile devices.

Although each has a different function, user experience and user interface must work together to create a usable site the target audience responds to. You can’t have excellent UX without excellent UI, and vice versa. The best designers consider both and implement them to their fullest potential.

Featured image via Pexels.

The post What’s the Difference Between Good UI and Good UX? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

2 février 2022/par Service comm.

11 Must-Follow Web Design Blogs

Need inspiration for an upcoming web design project? Want to learn how to add live chat functionality to your site, or which trends you should be aware of as you pursue new projects? Leading web design blogs could be the solution to your problems.

Just as marketers follow posts on websites like Search Engine Land and Mashable, and tech enthusiasts read up on Hacker Noon and TechCrunch, designers have plenty of blogs worth following too. The top web design blogs are incredible sources of inspiration, information, and guidance for today’s budding professionals. You can find insights into recent web design news stories or learn how to use new components in your website content.

As one of the best resources for any designer, a good web design publication can expand your education, act as an instant muse, or give you some much-needed entertainment.

Here are our top choices for the ultimate must-follow web design blogs.

1. Webdesigner Depot

You’re already here, so obviously, you already know that Webdesigner Depot’s a comprehensive hub of tech tips, news, thought leadership posts, and inspiration. Webdesigner Depot stands out among the most popular design blogs in the world. Frequently updated with content from a series of experienced authors, Webdesigner Depot is the go-to place for designers. Here, you’ll find the latest design news, explore the pros and cons of different coding systems, and discover some of the best design resources around.

We have many categories to choose from, including coding, news, resources, SEO, inspiration, content marketing, and user experience. You can even find the occasional “funny” post or poll to take part in too.

Many of the articles produced by Webdesigner Depot also go above and beyond the competition in terms of detail and depth. If you’re learning about freelance project management apps on this site, you can expect a complete overview of each of the available apps covered, along with notes on how to choose and use these tools correctly.

Webdesigner Depot also has a newsletter you can subscribe to in order to stay informed about recent posts.

2. Smashing Magazine

Another excellent publication popular among web design professionals, Smashing Magazine, covers all kinds of helpful content. To make finding the right posts a little easier, the company organizes content by category, covering topics like user experience, web design, React, JavaScript, CSS, and accessibility. You can also search through articles with the search bar at the top of the page.

Alongside standard blogs, Smashing Magazine also produces eBooks and guides for those who need more extensive information about a specific topic. All of the content shared on this website is designed to be easy-to-read and informative. You’ll find plenty of sketches, screenshots, and images to guide you through learning experiences too.

Notably, the blog has been around since 2006, so although it has a lot of material to explore, some of the content might be a little outdated. If you want to stay up-to-date with Smashing Magazine’s latest posts, you can also subscribe to their email newsletter for once-a-week messages.

3. The Design Blog

While many of the top design blogs on the market today focus on sharing a combination of inspirational and informative content, The Design Blog is explicitly intended for inspiration. The site shares a “designer of the week” every Monday, and that person’s content is featured on the web and social networks of TDB. There’s also a quote of the week, featured video, and free resources every week.

Most of the design blog’s content is split into sections according to the days of the week. Web design Wednesday is a great section to check out if you’re looking for inspiration. The segment covers a range of well-designed websites from different niches to help guide your next project.

On Thursdays, the design blog covers UI and UX designs from around the web, as well as well-designed apps from budding creatives. Every Friday, there’s a “freebie” offered on the site in the form of an available download or digital resource.

The design blog also covers recommended books and websites you should visit, leading Dribble profiles, and more. The biggest downside is navigating through all the available content can be quite a complicated process.

4. Web Design Ledger

Beautifully organized and packed with helpful information, the Web Design Ledger is an excellent site for designers to visit. The website splits into various segments depending on the kind of design you’re interested in. For web designers, there are content categories for portfolio work, mobile design, business development, ecommerce, and even wearable devices.

You’ll also find several sub-categories for sections like User Interface design, graphics, and web development. For those looking to learn from thought leaders in the industry, Web Design Ledger has a range of fantastic interviews to explore. There’s also a review section, where you can check out some of the latest tools available for design professionals.

The “Inspiration” section of the site also includes many great ideas for people who need a little creative boost for their next project. You can check out some top-rated WordPress themes, explore tips about branding and design for specific industries, and even get advice on logo creation.

5. Mockplus Blog

Mockplus is more than just a blog producer. The company offers tools to make design teams faster and more productive through unified collaboration, interactive prototyping, and scalable design systems. If you’re using Mockplus’ cloud technology for your design projects, there are plenty of tutorials and articles on the website tailored specifically to you.

The Mockplus blog, alternatively, delivers easy-to-consume content to designers from all environments, using various kinds of tools and software. You can find guides on how to experiment with new web design strategies and tips on how to master things like navigation menu design.

Many of the most popular posts on Mockplus are lists of useful resources, websites, and downloads you can use in your design tasks. For instance, you can use this site as inspiration when finding Android UI systems or wireframing tools. The site has a subscription form available for people who want to sign up for regular blog updates.

6. Design Bombs

Design Bombs is an attractive and reliable source of blog content for the design world. Easy to explore for beginners, Design Bombs even has a helpful “Start Here” section, where you can find beginner articles on how to start a blog, make a website, or use WordPress hosting. If you already know what you want to learn about, there are plenty of categories to choose from.

Content covered on Design Bombs ranges from the top WordPress plugins and themes on the market to news stories about recent design events and guides on coding or design. The “inspiration” section of the website is excellent for those who need a little creative refresh before working on the next part of their project, and Design Bomb also offers freebies and deals to readers too.

You can check the website regularly to see what kind of offers are available for popular design software and tools, as well as what sort of resources you can access for free. For beginners, the “glossary” section covering common design language is fantastic for your bookmarks.

7. Web Design Library

Otherwise known as Webdesign.org, Web Design Library is a simple but attractive blog environment for design professionals. The site includes a lot of valuable information for beginners and professionals looking to hone their skills. There’s a search bar to help you sort through content quickly at the top of the page, or you can choose your content focus through the “categories” section.

The Web Design Library has various categories to choose from, including web design basics, design principles, website usability, typography, Photoshop tutorials, web layout guidance, and HTML or CSS tips. You can also find plenty of inspiration in the “Showcase” section of the site.

Like many of the top web design blogs available today, Web Design Library offers access to extensive tutorials and guides for pros and beginners. You can learn everything from creating your first web page to how to shave someone’s head in Photoshop. The “Freebies” section on the site is a great place to visit for budget-friendly resources too.

8. Hacking UI

A community-focused website built for people who want to master the user interface, Hacking UI is a brilliant blog for all kinds of creative professionals. This laid-back website contains all sorts of different content for designers, including thought leadership articles, opinion posts, and even a regular podcast, where David Tintner and Sagi Shrieber discuss all kinds of design questions.

Hacking UI covers simple and complex topics alike. You can learn how to accelerate the performance of your web-design side project and how to make the transition from freelancer to a business owner. There are also topics like how to improve your workflows. Hacking UI covers a lot of content from worldwide events like the Global Innovation Forum too.

You can find information about upcoming events, conferences, and classes on the “Event” page, ideal for developers and designers who want to improve their skills. There’s also the Hacking UI “Master Class,” which constitutes a series of live conversations and lectures with experts in development and design.

9. 1stWebDesigner

One of the most attractive things about 1stWebDesigner, is its commitment to sharing ideas from a range of different designers and experienced creatives. Though still relatively new, 1stWebDesigner is a growing platform for sharing all kinds of design insights, including news, guides for learning, and lists for design inspiration.

The 1stWebDesigner site is wonderfully easy to navigate, with a search bar for those who want to find content on specific topics and keywords and a range of categories to choose from. You can check out collections of content on things like WordPress design, CSS, JavaScript, UX, Mobile UI, and Typography. There are also sections dedicated to things like Photoshop and how to succeed as a freelance designer.

1st Web Designer is a valuable source of inspiration for beginners and a great way to top up your knowledge as the design industry evolves. The “Learn” section is home to a host of guides and tutorials perfect for design enthusiasts from different backgrounds. Make sure you check out the site’s YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pages too.

10. Design Shack

Design Shack is a simple blog for beginners in the design landscape. Here, you’ll find many in-depth guides and tutorials to walk you through the basics of design. There are thousands of articles to explore, listed under several categories, including User Experience, app creation, and Photoshop. You can also search for specific content with the search bar.

Design Shack is particularly good at producing long-form content for designers in search of inspiration. Their lists of things like mock-up templates, photo collages, and premier pro templates are excellent. It’s also worth checking out the “Trends” section on the website, where you can find content written about some of the most appealing trends for design leaders.

Design Shack has a subscription available for those who want to stay up-to-date on the latest blog posts with regular emails. You can also interact with the community on sites like Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

11. Web Design Tuts+

Created by the Envato+ company, Web Design Tuts+ is a website offering learners in the design world all the information they need to excel in their projects. The website is packed full of free tutorials and learning guides, as well as online courses you can follow in your own time, to help you learn more about various aspects of web design. Tutorials and courses cover everything from interface design strategies to front-end development, UX (User Experience), and accessibility.

To help you figure out where to get started, Envato sorts all of its available guides and resources into sections based on the kind of design information they cover. You can also check out a list of the most popular and featured eBooks, courses, and tutorials on the homepage.

One thing Web Design Tuts+ does exceptionally well is translating complex ideas into simple guides. You don’t have to have a lot of coding knowledge or understand design-focused language to benefit from this site. Everything is written in an easy-to-digest format, with plenty of pictures and examples to guide you.

Choosing the Best Web Design Blog

As web design and development continue to thrive as a crucial skill in the digital world, there’s no shortage of blogs out there to help inspire and educate professionals. Whether you’re a beginner learning about the techniques required to start your first WordPress site, or you’re keen to know more about specific aspects of CSS code, there’s plenty of content to help you.

With a wide range of fantastic websites to choose from, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to picking the best web design blog. Many designers devote an entire folder in their bookmarks to blog pages, news sites, and other resources they can visit when they need information or inspiration. You may find yourself using various blogs throughout your career.

Our advice? Start with a website capable of covering many different topics in the web design world, to begin with. Resources like Web Designer Depot are packed full of content to sink your teeth into. Then, as you develop your knowledge in the industry, you’ll begin to find other more focused sites offering specific guidance into your chosen niche or specialty.

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post 11 Must-Follow Web Design Blogs first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

13 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

6 Tips for Collecting Customer Feedback (The Right Way)

Feedback is one of the most valuable resources for any business. Informative messages from your customers can tell you a lot about your company. They’re a way to check that your service strategies are paying off and a chance to learn which parts of your product need an upgrade.

Reviews and testimonials can also help you better understand your audience and the kind of solutions they’re looking for with your brand.

Solid feedback is also how you improve your chances of gaining more customers in the long term. Brands with superior customer service generate about 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors.

Of course, before you can begin tackling challenges like pulling trends from feedback or using your reviews to upgrade your business, you have one essential task to consider: How are you going to collect the valuable information your customers have to share?

There are a lot of options to choose from. You can reach out to clients individually with email messages or set up a feedback form on your website. You could even consider working with a review site to give your audience more options.

Today, we will look at the steps you can take to collect customer feedback the right way.

Unlocking the Benefits of Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the information and input shared by your community. It provides a behind-the-scenes view of people’s interactions with your team and shows you where you need to focus on beginning driving new opportunities.

Customer feedback becomes a guiding compass for your organization when used correctly. It shows you what you’re getting right and wrong from your customer’s perspective. Positive feedback can even become part of your marketing campaigns. User-generated content in the form of reviews and testimonials makes for excellent tools to encourage new people to purchase your products.

Case studies and in-depth reviews from your clients can also help generate trust among potential customers, so you’re more likely to earn crucial sales.

Only around 3% of customers say that they find marketers and salespeople “trustworthy.” This means that no matter how good your marketing messages might be, you’re only going to be able to accomplish so much with the claims you make about your brand. Ultimately, your clients will turn to other customers like them to determine who they should buy from.

On average, buyers read around seven reviews before they’ll even consider trusting a business.

The good news is that around two-thirds of customers will share their personal information with a brand. Clients are happy to provide feedback in the right circumstances. It’s your job to ensure that the process is as easy as possible for your customers.

So, how do you get customer reviews?

1. Design an Effective Feedback Survey

The most obvious way to encourage feedback from your customers is to ask for it. Unfortunately, designing a good customer survey isn’t always as simple as it seems.

On the one hand, you’re keen to gather as much information as possible from your customer, which could mean that you want to ask many questions. On the other hand, asking too many questions could easily scare your audience away.

To improve your audience’s chances of actually sharing information, keep the feedback requests as simple as possible.

One or two questions at a time should be enough to give you some helpful information about customer preferences and expectations. When choosing what to include in your survey, remember:

Only ask essential questions: If the answer to a question isn’t going to help you achieve your goals, don’t ask it. You don’t need to know someone’s age if you want to know if they had a good experience with your service reps. Keep it relevant.
Make the questions thoughtful: Yes or no questions are great for collecting quick information. However, if you want more valuable feedback, leave your queries open-ended, and give customers room to explain themselves.
Use rating scales: If your customer doesn’t have time to respond to a question in your survey with a complete answer, a rating scale can give you some helpful insights with minimal effort from the client.

Ensure none of the questions on your survey are leading or loaded. Customers don’t want to feel like you’re answering questions for them. It might also be worth showing your audience how much you value their data with a quick response. Hilton Hotels always responds to any adverse reactions to surveys within days of receiving the information.

Customers can even see how their reviews contribute to the overall rating of the business.

2. Master Your Emails and Customer Contact Forms

Email is one of the easiest and most effective ways to gather customer feedback. Because this is a standard support channel for most businesses, there are plenty of opportunities to generate feedback.

The first step in using emails for feedback is to send a message thanking your customer for their recent interaction with you. If someone purchased a product from your company, immediately follow up to let them know you appreciate their custom. A couple of days after, when your customer has had a chance to use your product or service, that’s when you follow up with your feedback request.

Ideally, your email request should be as short and straightforward as possible, with a clear call to action that tells your customer what to do next. This example from Papier keeps things as detailed as possible.

If you want to boost your chances of engagement, you can add elements to your email that might encourage a positive response, for instance:

Remind them of what they bought: Remind your customer of the item they purchased with a picture and a bit of information. Highlight the key features and benefits of that product, so they have some inspiration on what to write about in their review.
Offer them a reward: If you want to boost your chances of your customers doing something for you, you need to offer something in return. This could be a discount on their next order, a chance of winning something, or even just free shipping on their next purchase.
Personalize the message: Make your customer feel special by personalizing the message. Use their name and reference their previous interactions with your company. If they’ve been with your business for a while, mention that in the email.

Remember, many of your customers are likely to check their emails on the go. That means that giving feedback should be as simple as possible, regardless of the tech your customer is using. For instance, in this Zomato example, users can choose to drop an email to the company or send feedback straight from the app.

3. Create App Usability Tests

If you want some in-depth insights into your company, and your business processes, then a usability test could be the best way to generate valuable feedback. If you have your app, ask your customer to submit some information right there and then, after they’ve finished using the service. The great thing about this kind of input is it’s fresh.

Unlike other customer reviews that might come a day or two after your customer has used a product, usability tests allow you to get feedback at the moment. There’s a much better chance that you’re going to get some relevant and detailed responses here.

For instance, in this Skype lab feedback request, customers can tick boxes for any video or audio issues they had and leave a starred review.

If there’s extra information to share, the customer can tap on the comment box to elaborate. However, they don’t need to do this part unless they want to.

With usability tests, it’s a good idea to focus on a few key things that you want to learn about. For instance, Skype’s example above demonstrates that the company wants to check at least five user experience issues for both video and audio.

Giving your customers options that they can choose from reduces the amount of work they need to put into leaving a review. It also means that you can get actionable information on which parts of your app or site need the most improvement.

You can get the same kind of instant feedback on your website, too, mainly if you’re using a live chat app for customer service.

Live chat is quickly becoming an essential part of the customer experience environment because it’s fast, easy to use, and efficient. It’s also highly affordable for most companies, thanks to evolving technology. Set up your Live Chat app to immediately request a review from your customer when the interaction is over.

For instance, SiteGround asks customers to rate their service provider with a picture of the employee they spoke to. The image lets the customer see that they were talking to a real person, which improves the relationship with the company. The statement about feedback improving the customer service and support that SiteGround can offer shows the customer how valuable their reviews are.

4. Conduct Customer Interviews

Conducting a customer interview is a lot like sending out a survey. The main difference is that you ask the client to engage in a much more in-depth conversation. Usually, these interviews will be the initial research required for a published case study on a B2B website.

Reaching out to valuable and loyal customers can give you a fantastic source of in-depth information to learn from. You’ll need to make sure that you have a good relationship with the customer in question before you attempt this, however. Most one-time clients won’t want to get involved with a time-consuming interview.

Look at your CRM technology and find out who your most impressive VIP customers are. Reach out to them with a request for feedback, and make sure you offer something in return. For instance, tell them that you’d like to interview for a case study that you can display on your website. If they’re happy for you to do this, you can reward them with a discount on their next purchase or some gifts.

You could also follow up with a customer who recently contacted your team for an interview, like Ticket Arena does here. With this message, they promise the customer that their insights will make the customer experience better for future clients:

When requesting long-form qualitative feedback, remember to think through your questions carefully. In-depth stories from customers bring nuance and color to your quantitative data. They could even guide your business to making some crucial future decisions.

When talking to your customers:

Start with an open-ended dialogue: Remember that open-ended questions are crucial to get as much detail as possible from your customers. These queries give your customers more flexibility to cover the details of their experiences.
Get more specific as you go: Start with simple questions, then build on them as your conversation evolves. Use the things you learn from your customers to dive into topics that are relevant to them. For instance, if a customer mentions your live chat app, go into a deeper discussion about the channels they prefer to use.
Practice active listening: Make sure that you’re open and receptive to the information you’re given. Actively listen to customers, even if you’re not in the same room, by acknowledging what they say and providing valuable responses.

5. Use Social Media

Sometimes, people are reluctant to give feedback for your business on your website because they’re not in the frame of mind. When customers come to your site, there’s a good chance they’re looking for information from you or want to check out a new product.

They’re probably not in the right mood to start sharing their opinions.

However, if you capture your customers on social media, there’s a good chance they’ll be feeling a lot more talkative. After all, social media platforms are where most customers discuss their issues with companies, talk about purchases with friends, and make their voices heard.

Simply paying attention to when people talk about your company on social media can give you a lot of helpful feedback. Social listening tools allow you to collect post information every time someone mentions your business name or product.

Alternatively, you can actively use the tools on social media to gather data from customers. For instance, Instagram has its own “poll” feature on Stories that allows companies to collect opinions.

If you’re collecting feedback on social media, remember that you shouldn’t be asking any questions that are too complicated. Although people are more willing to share their opinions on social, they’re still looking for a relatively laid-back and casual experience.

Polls, where people can vote for their preferences with a single click, are more likely to garner engagement than a post asking people to tell you about the best purchasing experience they ever had with your brand.

If you do want to encourage more in-depth feedback, the best option is to promise a reward in return for your follower’s effort.

Make the experience fun by transforming it into a competition.

For instance, ask your customers to share their favorite story involving your brand for a chance to win an impressive prize. You can ask each customer to tag their response with a branded hashtag so that relevant answers are easier to find. You could even add users to tag their friends in their posts too, to increase brand reach while you collect feedback:

With gifts and rewards to incentivize them, people will be much more likely to interact with your brand and put effort into the reviews they leave. You could even gather some user-generated content to put into your subsequent ad campaigns.

6. Create a Dedicated Website Page

Finally, if you want to make it as simple as possible for people to leave feedback on your website and for you to collect all of that information into one space, then create a review page on your website. This can double up as social proof for people who need additional evidence to buy from your brand.

A review page could be as simple as a page on your website listing the latest comments that your customers have left. You can include a form at the bottom of the page where people can add their thoughts. Just make sure that you carefully review these posts before they’re submitted to your website if you want to prevent spam from getting through.

You could also create a case study or portfolio page that showcases the work you’ve done with other companies like Fabrik Brands does here:

At the bottom of each case study, give your customers a unique email address they can reach out to if they want to be featured as your following case study. Or include a contact form where people can get in touch to discuss their own experiences.

Having a dedicated review, case study, or testimonial page on your website could be enough to inspire more feedback from your customers. It’s also a fantastic way to demonstrate how credible your company is to potential buyers.

Still, Struggling? Take the Customer Out of the Equation

If, even with all the suggestions above, you still can’t seem to convince your audience to give you some decent feedback, then take them out of the equation. You can learn things about your audience without asking them for information. Google Analytics and other tools will give you valuable insights into which of your blog pages get the most engagement and how many people click on individual buttons throughout your site.

These fundamental insights might not be as good as valuable, contextual feedback from your audience, but they’re an excellent way to start figuring out how to invest in your future growth.

Remember, feedback of any kind – even if it’s just statistics and numbers – gives your business the ability to grow and make informed decisions.

Gather as much feedback as you can, and make sure you use it!

Featured image via Pexels.

The post 6 Tips for Collecting Customer Feedback (The Right Way) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.