How to Enhance Marketing Engagement Rates with Web Links & QR Codes for Call / Chat

We’ve come a long way since the days of printed mailers, yellow pages and telemarketing. Even a few digital platforms have come and gone, while e-mail has stood the test of time and smartphones have made websites a mobile-first channel. The way we measure engagement has also evolved - with open rates, read rates, and click through rates showing us what is working and what isn’t.

Winning marketing strategies today are rarely a one-size-fits-all approach, which means businesses need to be on top of their game when it comes to testing and iterating their approach. In this guide, we’ll take a look at the top channels for engaging customers that are still relevant today, and then explore a couple of new tools for enhancing the tried-and-true methods you should already be using.

CINNOX helps you integrate QR codes and web links for call & chat

Email Marketing

Email is still a highly effective way to reach people. Campaign Monitor defines a successful email marketing campaign as having an open rate of 15-25% and click through rate of 2.5% –not bad for a digital medium that first became prevalent in the mid-90s. But what if you’re looking for purchases, orders, or more traffic to your e-commerce website?

According to a survey by CINNOX, email marketing engagement have dropped somewhat in recent years due to a growing preference for engaging with brands in the same way we chat with our friends, family, and colleagues – today, 87% of people choose to use social media and instant messaging to talk to businesses.

Leveraging CINNOX web links in EDMs combines the best of both worlds – by emailing out a link to initiate a live conversation via call or chat, you can easily boost engagement rates. Customers don’t have to make a voice call or check their inbox to get a reply from you – they can simply ask a question, place an order or get the support they need in a single click – offering a better overall user experience.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are still a great way to reach audiences - but with costs rising, ROI has been suffering. To combat this, many marketers have been connecting Facebook ads to Messenger, as it can result in around 30% higher ROI. However, not all customers want to talk with brands on Messenger – preferring to only have friends in their chat list. Businesses may also find conversation-based marketing campaigns to be a handful – which indeed it can be, without the right tools.

Inserting CINNOX web links to the Facebook ad as an alternative to Messenger enables businesses to access more comprehensive insights and analytics about the campaign, and most importantly track if the customer has communicated with them on other channels – such as WhatsApp or live chat.

Alternatively, if businesses prefer to use Messenger, it’s made even easier with CINNOX by centralizing all omnichannel communication on to one dashboard. Answering messages from the campaign is streamlined as staff don’t need to keep changing between platforms when engaging customers, and can easily transfer chats to the best staff to support complex enquiries.

^SMS

A tried-and-true method for grabbing attention, SMS still has an incredibly high open rate of 98% and response rate 209% higher than other channels. Businesses have been heavily focused on using SMS for appointment reminders and confirmations, but often need to send multiple SMS due to character limits and various touchpoints needed for each customer – eg; enquiry link, appointment link (such as video call), update link, web site etc. This often means that businesses sending at least send at least 2-3 SMS to 1 customer for a single appointment.
Halve the cost and improve customer experience with CINNOX web links.

A 1-click, 1 link solution, customers can start an enquiry, change a booking, or launch the video consultation all through the same web link. Save the character limit for a quality message, and reduce the number of SMS sent to customers.

CINNOX’s SMS campaigns can be designed and sent worldwide to 160 markets in seconds, save your favorite templates for use in the next campaign!

Offline Advertising

Offline remains a very important aspect of any integrated marketing effort - including newspapers in ad campaigns has proven to increase the effectiveness of the campaign – with a 5.7x increase in the finance sector, 2.8x increase in the retail sector, 1.7x increase in the automotive industry, and 3x increase in the travel sector.

CINNOX QR codes ensure easier conversion from offline to online orders, and enable marketers to finally track offline ad effectiveness by measuring the enquiry volume and sales conversion directly from each ad. Rather than calculating the ROI through guesstimates, you can utilize solid data from CINNOX to measure your return. Customers can immediately scan the QR code to start a chat or call, for a streamlined O2O experience. Read more on QR codes below.

Boosting engagement rates on channels you already use

As you may already know, CINNOX is an all-in-one communication and collaboration platform that centralizes all of your channels and staff together. A couple of unique tools from CINNOX are web links and QR codes for call & chat, which both offer strong growth opportunities for brands to increase engagement rates, improve customer experiences, and convert more sales.

What are web links for call & chat?

Most of us have tried using a hyperlinked phone number, which then opens the number in your phone’s calling app. Although convenient for mobile users, this can be a problem if you’re travelling or calling an overseas number – or if you are using a desktop. This can create bottlenecks for customers who then need to manually type in the numbers on a different app, and a bad user experience overall.

CINNOX provides unique web links that can connect customers directly to an individual staff member, or a group of staff – without the use of a phone number. These web links can initiate a call or chat, whether through the CINNOX web communication widget, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, and can even launch a CINNOX video call. This ensures that your staff are reachable worldwide from both desktop and mobile, or phone data connections. This provides a cost effective solution with no HTML coding needed – just copy and paste the link.

What are QR codes for call & chat?

QR codes work the same way as web links – except that your customers can scan the QR code to launch the call or chat. While web links can be used anywhere online, QR codes are excellent for all offline materials such as posters, booklets, product packaging, name cards – even printed on products themselves.

Top 5 ways our customers use QR codes to increase marketing engagement

• On street signage for restaurant bookings
• At exhibitions to enable guests to freely connect with exhibitor sales teams, with no connectivity restrictions
• In event programs so readers can easily get in touch with experts or speakers
• On outdoor adverts, where customers often make snap decisions to purchase
• On products and packaging so customers can easily scan and start a call with customer service – and turn on video calls for technical demos or troubleshooting

Email Signatures & Business Cards

Modernise your email signatures and business cards – add web links to email signatures as an easy 1-click contact method, to offer a more secure alternative to phone numbers, WhatsApp, WeChat and other channels, especially for sales teams.

After clicking on a web link or scanning a QR code, a virtual business card opens where customers can see your photo, title, and email – digitally transforming traditional business cards.

Customer Identity and Intelligence

Knowing your customer helps you to serve them better. No matter what touchpoint your customers come through, CINNOX lets you see their full communication context and history. Whether they scanned a QR code on a flyer, started a call from an email, or sent you a Facebook message – you’ll know what questions they’ve asked in the past as well as their location, device/browser language, device type, and more – so you can hit the ground running with great customer service every time.

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