Tools that support sales in an online store

Achieving success in sales is dependent on many factors - apart from your passion, determination, and creativity, you also need to thoroughly get to know your potential and current customers in order to accompany them at every stage of the purchasing process. But how do you provide consumers with a consistent and unforgettable experience that will grant your business advantage over the competition? Reach for tools that increase conversion in your online store, which will additionally improve the efficiency and organization of your team’s work.

Sales support tools are applications and software dedicated to sellers and marketers, designed to facilitate and automate their work and improve the level of customer service. The key to choosing the right tools is to find the solutions that best suit the individual needs of your business. And there is a lot to choose from, because their area of operation and scope of functionality are so broad that they can be divided into several categories, including: tools for customer relationship management (CRM), analytics or sales automation and integration.

Take a look at our guide in which we present sale-supporting e-commerce tools and check out the benefits that the implementation of the best practices in your online store brings with it.

Online customer support tools

We have already devoted an extensive entry on our blog to solutions for managing contacts with customers. Therefore, now we will only briefly recall the advantages of implementing CRM systems for your company and suggest which tools are currently the most popular.

The most important benefits of CRM tools are:

• managing all interactions with the customer from one place at every stage of the consumer’s life cycle; 
• organizing and ensuring positive and consistent customer experiences throughout their relationship with the company;
• translating a lot of data from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into concrete business information;
• the ability to personalize your message and prepare an offer that meets the requirements of consumers; 
• improving communication both with customers and between company departments, which speeds up the flow of information and teamwork; 
• identifying sales opportunities, detecting service problems or effective management of marketing campaigns translate into an increase in the company’s revenues. 

The growing popularity of CRM systems has resulted in the appearance of a whole range of instruments on the market dedicated to multi-channel customer service. Attention should be given to the Pipedrive online system available in a Polish version or HubSpot and Salesforce, which are dedicated to medium and large enterprises, whereas in the case of communication with the client, LiveChat and Tidio seem to work very well.

Creating heat maps 

Crazy Egg - using this tool, by tracking all the events on the website you will find out if your page is intuitive enough for users. With a heatmap, or click maps, you will get information on which elements are most often clicked on by users and which ones tend to be ignored. Crazy Egg examines specific user actions, showing the depth of page scrolling and search terms - so you can verify whether you have placed your call to action (CTA) in the right place. Thus, by investing in the application you will improve the comfort of using the website and increase its effectiveness by improving the conversion rate.

Hotjar - allows you to study specific user behaviors on the website, checking what attracts their attention and what discourages them from buying. With its help, you will learn how customers move around your site and watch recordings of all customer activity. Recording buyers’ activity is not the only functionality, as Hotjar also offers analysis of surveys, forms, and customer paths. Information obtained in this way about which products/services enjoy the greatest and slightly less popular interest is a valuable hint for UX designers who design positive user experiences. Finally, with the help of Hotjar, you will find the answer to the question that bothers every salesperson, precisely at what stage of the sales process the cart abandonment occurs.

Newsletters, email advertising and text message marketing

FreshMail - will work in the case of email marketing and newsletter distribution, offering ready-made message templates that can be changed depending on the degree of content personalization. FreshMail also generates valuable reports on the effectiveness of the emailing carried out and organizes your mailing lists. From the tool level you can also carry out A/B tests, enrich the campaign with text message sending and perform anti-spam analysis, which is helpful in locating errors in your creation.

Check out also: MailerLite

FreshMail templates, https://freshmail.com/

MailChimp - allows you to build fully responsive newsletters, which you can personalize with your customers’ preferences in mind, and track the results of implemented campaigns through intelligible reports. Whereas automating tasks in MailChimp will relieve your marketing team, even in the case of non-standard activities. The biggest advantages mentioned in the context of this solution are its intuitiveness and ease of use, and these can be seen especially in the case of designing simple templates (you don’t need to be familiar with coding or the basics of HTML here). It’s worth giving MailChimp credit for a number of additional services that make the tool one of the most comprehensive platforms that makes use of many channels of communication with the client.

Check out also: Campaign Monitor

MailChimp Selected functionalities, https://mailchimp.com/

GetResponse - apart from creating automated mailing campaigns, you will use this tool to build landing pages, CRM, and even organize webinars. Additionally, you’ll be able to connect the system with Facebook Ads and Google Ads - allowing you to carry out your marketing activities from one account. The possibilities of GetResponse do not end with the aforementioned integrations, and the tool surprises with a number of sales solutions. Designing conversion funnels, web push notifications, or exit forms - all these tasks can be achieved within one platform for the automation of marketing processes.

Check out also: ActiveCampaign

When searching for tips on email marketing - one of the oldest forms of internet marketing - we recommend reading our blog post in which we suggest how to improve the effectiveness of your activities.

TideMobile - these are tools for conducting online campaigns by sending and receiving text, multimedia, and voice messages. Mobile marketing in the form of notifications, thanks, or discount codes is a good way of distinguishing your communication from other advertising messages. Text or multimedia messaging provides the advantage of instant contact with customers and reaching the addressee with the offer directly.

Check out also: SMSAPI 

Some time ago, we had the opportunity to talk to a representative of Tide Software, who revealed to us the secrets to an effective text messaging campaign. 

TideMobile services, https://www.tidemobile.com.pl

Speaking of newsletters, this list cannot omit Landingi, i.e. a platform that allows you to create simple and legible landing pages, mobile pages, pop-ups, and sales funnels for the needs of a specific campaign or promotional campaign. 

Analysis of website traffic and image monitoring on the web

We decided to group here both tools that analyze traffic and content on your website, e.g. Google Analytics and Senuto, as well as advanced solutions that allow you to examine all mentions and opinions about products, service quality and the brand itself on the Internet, e.g. Brand24 and Rating Captain.

Google Analytics - allows you to check the traffic on the website and thus answer the question whether your website is sufficiently visible to users. With GA you can track statistics on the number of page views of a given website, as well as the demographic data of users visiting your website and actions taken by consumers. The new GA version currently available - Google Analytics 4 - surprised us with a few improvements that you can read about here.

Check out also: SimilarWeb

Google Analytics demo account, https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/

Senuto - a tool dedicated primarily to SEO specialists, based on an index of keywords, on the basis of which the visibility and monitored position of the page are analyzed. With Senuto you will learn how your domain is doing on Google based on specific phrases and how it fares against the competition. Such an audit of your website is a prelude to its optimization in terms of content and external and internal linking, and all these activities translate into an increase in the credibility of your website.

Check out also: Semstorm

Brand24 - if you don’t want to be limited only to a company website and want to start monitoring your brand image on the Internet, use a tool to protect your business reputation online. Brand24 scours social media, blogs, forums, review sites, and more for mentions of your business, and then analyzes them for sentiment. In this way, we find out not only where the discussion about us is taking place, but also what significance the published statements have.

Check out also: SentiOne and Brandwatch

Brand24 panel view, https://panel.brand24.com

Rating Captain - online feedback management is another process, often wrongly understood in the image strategy, which increases conversion in the online store. Effective obtaining of positive opinions and monitoring the quality of services is possible thanks to the Rating Captain application. The tool has a ready system that sends invitations to issue opinions in accordance with your visual identification and reaches customers upon placing an order. Another functionality is the analysis of problems in the field of customer service and the recommendation of actions aimed at overcoming difficulties. Do not forget that opinions are one of the factors that build trust in the brand - so go for an application that will naturally raise the rating of your business.

Rating Captain panel view, https://ratingcaptain.com/

Aware of the fact that it’s impossible to exhaust the topic of sales support tools in one article, we want to throw in a handful of solutions that will allow your e-commerce team to work more effectively. We have grouped the following proposals into thematic areas so that you can choose the best options for your business:

• monitoring of sales offers - Sellizer;
• marketing automation - SalesManago, Marketo;
• e-commerce integration and sales management - Baselinker;
• building a contact database - Detective by Charlie, Clearbit;
• arranging meetings - Calendly, Appoint.ly.

Comprehensive tools of a modern trader enable the automation of many aspects of sales. The presented solutions will make your conversion soar, and the process of building customer engagement will run much more efficiently. We hope that our subjective review of platforms supporting sales activities will help you dynamically develop your online store and generate higher revenues. If you use other tools to support online sales on a daily basis, be sure to share your inspirations with us.