If email marketing is not working, then Fortune 500 brands will not touch it with a ten-foot pole. But the fact that Walmart, Amazon, Apple, BuzzFeed, and a lot of other Fortune 500 brands are utilizing the email marketing strategy shows there is a lot of good in the marketing method.

Statista projects that there will be 4.3 billion global email users in 2023. If you add this to the fact that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42, there is no reason why your brand must not integrate email marketing.

It’s important to note, however, that no single innovation can solve all the problems in the marketing world and even though brands spend billions of dollars on digital adoption, 80% of consumers switch brands due to poor CX . Sometimes, we may need to re-strategize. For instance, emails may not suffice for a real-time experience and we will then need a live chat.

Live chat is fastly becoming the most popular means of communicating with customers. And this is largely due to the growth we are experiencing in messaging apps and automated bots.

The opportunities businesses are deriving from the live chat are mostly felt by customer support and marketing. Businesses are quickly catching up with the idea that live chat is much more than just a budget-friendly support channel.

Businesses globally know that marketing their products or services by email is a fast, flexible, and cost-effective way for the acquisition of new customers and also the retention of old customers by encouraging repeat website visits.

With email marketing, brands go on to create targeted and personalized messages. They are also able to segment customers based on certain characteristics and even automate emails.

The essence of all these is to build an understanding that can blossom into brand loyalty with the customers. You should, however, be very careful in how you use email marketing.

When you send marketing emails that are irrelevant, too frequent, disturbing, or unwanted, your customers will find it irritating and annoying. In the world of spam, you need to understand what your customer wants before sending out the message if you do not take this precaution, your messages may be deleted and the customer churns or unsubscribes.

When your emails go to the targeted audience, your click-through rates will significantly improve.

Why do you still need live chat?

Going by the fact that we have email marketing automation, whereby a marketer can send triggered or timed promotional emails to subscribers on their mailing list, there shouldn’t be a need for live chat. 

Even though marketers can use email marketing automation to send out personalized messages to both prospects and customers on a schedule, it can’t be compared to live chat, which improves your customer journey by offering customers quicker service, faster resolution, and greater flexibility.

With live chats, you don’t have to wait on hold, responses must be in real-time. The average reaction time for humans to a visual stimulus is 0.25 seconds and 0.17 seconds to an audio stimulus. Going by this data, you should expect a service agent to resolve a customer’s pain point in about 60seconds.

With apps like Live chat Shopify, you can even respond faster to create convenient communication channels for customers who can contact you while browsing your website no matter where they are.  The most important thing is that live chat is convenient.

Whether it’s the support team or the customer, you can carry on working, shopping, eating, or whatever you were doing while having a chat conversation. This is one customer service that is tailored to suit everybody, notwithstanding your lifestyle.

You may be confused on how live chat will be useful in the acquisition of customers; that is why it needs to complement email marketing. The whole idea will be to contact potential customers with email marketing and sustain them with live chat.

The potential customers can even be from your competitors who you got to know while conducting sentiment analysis of product review data. Millions of people around the globe today find it very easy to express their feelings on products and brands through the internet.

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They can do this in a Yelp review, in a Twitter thread, or a Facebook post. It’s your business as a brand to intercept these online “conversations,” so that you can learn more about your customers and users, as well as the customers of your competitors in the market.

The initial means of contacting a customer or potential lead will be through email and you then switch to live chat for subsequent discussions. This will afford you the opportunity of offering real-time support to your customers.

Chat is not a complicated channel to install and manage and you need to install it because customers value personal and instant means of interaction The most important thing to customers is the opportunity to speak to a real person; they may do it through a phoning system or live chat support.

Nobody wants to wait for a delayed reply, and studies reveal that consumers prefer live chat support. This is even in the face of the popularity of social media as a means of expressing customers’ sentiments and opinions. Live chat offers customers immediate help while requiring minimal effort.

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Live chat is a means for you to answer questions and address your customers’ pain points when they need your help most. Email marketing alone cannot do that and even where it’s done, it can’t be in real-time.

You can make use of a CTA to inform your visitors that they have the option of using live chat when they visit your website.

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When sending emails, explicitly tell them that live chat will be available during the purchase process in case they encounter problems.

Conclusion

Your customers want to be recognized. You must, therefore, see them as individuals, not as ticket numbers. They become irritated when you make them repeat themselves endlessly.

By complementing email marketing with live chat, you will ensure a consistent, unified approach to customer service that is also personalized and proactive.

The tech ecosystem seems to be constantly changing as digital technologies continuously disrupt how brands and consumers interact. It might be a strange time for many traditionalists who struggle to predict the next frontier. However, when in doubt or confusion, the most brilliant individuals use others’ knowledge to gain their profits.

Digital Transformation is a wave of changes that promise to make our lives better and improve the backbone of institutions. However, there is a growing wave that the system is broken, and the way to fix it is decentralization and setting up systems of accountability. 2022 is a year of reform within the business class and better services for the consumers.

This article summarizes all the knowledge of technologists to determine Digital Transformation in 2022: Trends, Predictions, and Insights.

1.   Semiconductor shortage

While there will be more digitization insight, a significant roadblock that continues to be a limiting factor is semiconductor shortage. Companies have had a tough time meeting the demand, which has led to companies shifting to older processor nodes. Furthermore, some products such as car machinery have to reduce the number of semiconductors they planned to install initially. It will continue to be a significant roadblock for years to come.

Other issues arising are geopolitical factors that will continue to contribute to the lack of necessary materials across the chain. It will be a hiccup in the digital transformation for companies but won’t create a long-term downturn in the trend.

2.   Greater privacy concerns

A significant growing trend that we will essentially see a repeat is GDPR and other government authorities clamping down on data. Governments will consistently ask companies to adhere to more excellent regulations, creating a skirmish. For example, early in the year, the European Union decided to clamp down on Google Analytics, setting the tone of a trend over the year.

A more significant amount of compliance will lead to slowdowns in the digital transformation but ultimately positively for the ecosystem.  

3.   Metaverse and VR revolution

The word Meta and VR has become more mainstream with the office spaces, socializing becoming more virtual. Big tech has now made a significant bet on these two platforms, and they are experimenting with digital properties on sale. As a result, a whole new platform level in the digital arena is being unlocked; the upsides can be huge in the long term. However, there is still some debate with detractors questioning the value of underlying assets and their overall volatility.

There is still much to explore within the realm and how businesses can further reach out to their users. The use of AR will also see new experimentation as a whole new digital layer over the physical world.

4.   AI continues to be dominated.

Artificial Intelligence will continue to make leaps and bounds in its progress, with the AI-based hardware accelerating the progress. Alongside the AI revolution, automation will continue to cut down on the person-hours spent on repetitive tasks. The mix of data-based training AI solutions will dominate the way Businesses will serve customers and business partners.

Companies are already integrating AI and team workers to integrate, boosting their productivity significantly. More emphasis will be placed on predicting the customer’s decisions by the precious datasets. Enterprise will apply it all across the ecosystem, and the systems in place will advance the progress of Digital Transformation.

5.   Cybersecurity concerns

Digital transformation is not sunshine and rainbows as more significant vulnerabilities will get abused by criminals. Businesses will invest further to improve their security protection and root out the vulnerability. More ransomware will require greater cooperation among the feds and authorities. It will continue to be an ongoing concern and require more significant learning across the ecosystem.

The use of cryptocurrency in cybercrimes will require new regulations in 2022.

6.   Blockchain gets bigger.

Blockchain already powers the new digital industry, but there’s still much to achieve regarding environmental impact. New techniques such as proof of stake are gaining steam to pivot from the high mining costs through GPUs. New forms of Metaverse and NFT landscape will further be powered by Blockchain, creating a great platform of security choice for consumers.

Many businesses, massive financial institutions, and startups from finance tech will play around with Blockchain tech. However, to make such a significant shift will take time and whole toolsets to be established. Nevertheless, 2022 will be the year many companies will lay the foundation for future large-scale changes and reforms.

Conclusion

2022 will be a year that will have some highs and lows for the Digital Transformation cause. There are many factors like Covid, geopolitical and environmental reasons why large-scale transitions have become faster and slower. Businesses will have to be quite agile to how things evolve and IT infrastructure thrive.

The digital transformation will significantly boost because of the need to compete with rising startup cultures. Some companies will shift to more hyper-automation methodologies before coming back to a mix of the two. Businesses and the world will get closer to each other with shared solutions rising all the tides.

The act of sharing information and communicating efficiently with colleagues, clients, and peers has evolved many times since the emergence of Microsoft PowerPoint, and the rise of the internet. More recently, in the wake of Covid-19, the task of clearly communicating information to others has become more essential than ever before. 

Since the growth of the internet, Microsoft PowerPoint has ruled the roost as the world’s favourite presentation software, however, Google has created a formidable free competitor in its Slides platform. Elsewhere, Apple’s Keynote software has also been continually improving for users. 

Presentations have long been an effective way of sharing a wealth of important information with individuals in an engaging manner. But for many, creating visually striking, engaging visual content can be a challenge in itself. Many presenters aren’t graphic designers, and the effective use of colours, designs, and pagination aren’t a natural strength for them. 

Fortunately, one of the greatest perks of presentation software is the ability to utilise pre-designed templates. Powered Template is a huge resource of professionally created presentation templates that are compatible with the likes of Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides and Apple Keynote – they can also come with a range of different purposes and specialities. 

For many of us out there who can find it difficult to know where to start with a blank presentation screen, Powered Template may be a godsend. 

With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at how Powered Template helps users to create engaging and resonant presentations without the stress of users having to build their content from scratch. 

Choosing from a Huge Range of Templates

Are you looking to create a company roadmap? Or perhaps you need to create a presentation specific to your industry, like real estate, legal, transportation, or construction? Maybe you’re looking to create a pitch deck for a VC. No matter the reason for your presentation, Powered Template offers a vast range of options to help get you started in the best possible way. 

Powered Template features a dynamic and intuitive menu bar which allows users to quickly find the type of presentation format, category, and slide volume that suits their needs. With over 25,000 PowerPoint templates and more than 1,000 themes for both Google Slides and Apple Keynote, the chances are that you’ll be well catered for in finding the right layout for your needs. 

The wide repertoire of presentation styles also covers the various forms of information that slides can convey. Users are capable of picking themes that feature pie charts, graphs, matrix charts, and tables that are easy to populate with data – allowing you to easily create engaging visuals that help to to share important information. 

Find Your Style with 100% Customisable Templates

The beauty of Powered Template downloads is that once you load the slides in your presentation software, you’re free to edit them in whatever way you like. This means that you can add your own branding, watermarks, diagrams, or personal touches however you see fit. 

At present, there are over 90,000 presentations available on Powered Template, and once downloaded, each selection can be edited as heavily or as subtle as the user would like. Though for free downloads, an attribution is generally required to remain on the template. 

Leading Customer Care

The quality of customer service offered by Powered Templates is second to none in the industry. As soon as you arrive on the website’s pages, you’re greeted with the option to start a live chat to speak to an agent on-hand to help with any queries that you may have. 

The website’s Contact Us section also features a range of helpful troubleshooting email addresses that are tailor suited to the type of query that you have – helping you to find the right member of staff in good time. 

Another great example of Powered Template’s excellent customer care comes in the form of its highly-flexible pricing structure. In the image above, we can see that users can buy subscriptions on a monthly, or annual basis. But for those who simply want to access slide templates on-demand, it’s possible to purchase 10 premium downloads which can be accessed at any point over the course of a year. 

Furthermore, Powered Template also has thousands of beautiful free to use templates that simply require accreditation on the template itself – meaning that no signup is necessary to gain access to a suitable template. 

The Beauty of Perpetual Optimisation

When you first take a look at Powered Template, it doesn’t take long to discover that the website is built on a vibrant community of slide creators who continually populate the platform with fresh ideas and eye-catching templates. 

When searching for templates, it’s possible to sort your results by ‘newest’ first – helping you to continually find fresh ideas to use in your next presentation. 

With new content cropping up on a daily basis, it’s little wonder that Powered Template is trusted by individuals and many Fortune 500 companies alike. With a steady stream of freshly optimised templates, you’re free to engage audiences and impress clients with new designs long into the future.