Dieter Petereit February 27th, 2013

WebEngage Interactivates Your Website

Your main goal in running a commercial website may be set to high profitability. Especially when you are running an online shop, you will want to generate the highest revenue possible, the more buyers you attract the better. In ecommerce one strong handicap exists. You cannot interact with the prospective buyer in a way you would be able to in a real shop of the analog world. The would-be buyer has to rely on the one-way communicative efforts your website offers. WebEngage changes that, if you let it...

webengage-homepage-teaser

WebEngage: Your Customer Is King

WebEngage is a software that cares for three main pillars of customer satisfaction. And they all relate to - as you could have already guessed - engagement. WebEngage lets you engage with the visitors of your website or lets them engage with you, any way round you like to see it.

[caption id="attachment_75092" align="alignnone" width="550"]WebEngage: Three Pillars of Customer Satisfaction WebEngage: Three Pillars of Customer Satisfaction[/caption]

Before I show you the benefits in closer detail, let me emphasize what convinced me almost immediately. It's the ease and speed of implementation. With WebEngage you need not change anything on your site. You just add a short JavaScript snippet and you are good to go. The rest of the configuration is done through a user-friendly dashboard on behalf of WebEngage's cloud servers (powered by Amazon Web Services). Besides having to add the JavaScript, you will never have to touch the code of your site again. Any enhancement taking place - and there always happen some with more to come - is immediately available to you as WebEngage is a specimen of the so-called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

That way it took me five minutes to get going. Ten more minutes were needed to finish my feedback form and some notifications as well as a short survey. I assume we've come to the point where I should tell you more about the WebEngage feature set.

WebEngage comprises of three modules entitled Survey, Feedback and Notifications. These titles are not really self-explanatory and even - at least if you do not dig deeper - imply similar functionality. Of course the features relate to one another as they are all part of the bigger purpose of turning your customers to kings...

The following video shows the benefits of the product trio nicely. Take 102 seconds and watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5poyDyvHApw

WebEngage Surveys Allows For Tailored Feedback

Let's take a look at Surveys. A survey is exactly what you thought it was. A short or not so short questionnaire you try to make your customers answer to. As I write about it, I notice that it takes a good ability of abstraction to understand what kind of powerful tools WebEngage equips you with. So let me show you some real world uses a survey as defined by WebEngage could provide. A survey would be right for you if:

  • you've got a flower shop and you want to give your visitors the possibility to name a plant they'd like to see added to your stock of products.
  • you've got a rather detailed spec sheet for different versions of the same product, just as WebEngage has. On the pricing page you might want to assist your prospective customers further by offering specific help.
  • you're running a special sale and would like to know if or if not there is interest in further activities like these.
  • you want to know more about customers visiting you from specific regions of the globe.
  • you want to know more about a specific section of your visitors, probably males, females or visitors using a certain browser or certain search phrases and more.
  • you might want to give your buyers the possibility to voice their opinion post purchase on how the sales process worked for them.
[caption id="attachment_75099" align="alignnone" width="479"]WebEngage: Survey In Action WebEngage: Survey In Action[/caption]

These are a mere few examples. There are almost endless possibilities.

WebEngage Feedback Let's Your Visitors Have Their Say

The above mentioned targeting possibilities are valid throughout the whole product range. So also for Feedback you can target specific locations, specific referrers, specific search terms and more.

What Feedback was originally invented for was the more technical feedback, that's needed whenever there is something broken or not running flawlessly. Images, that are not loading, links, that are not working, designs, that are not displaying correctly. You name it. To address these issues even visually, WebEngage comes with the ability to automatically add a screen-shot of the page the feedback was submitted from.

[caption id="attachment_75086" align="alignnone" width="479"]WebEngage: Feedback Live On Site WebEngage: Feedback Live On Site[/caption]

Besides that, Feedback is similar to Survey, but conceived to be its more general counterpart. The module Feedback is something you will want to position prominently and consistently on every page of your website. It is the hot wire between you and your (prospective) customers.

Feedback is thought up as being omnipresent, still it can come in different appearances depending on where on the site it is going to be displayed. The form is fully customizable and is even able to handle different purposes through different categories within one single layout. It is even able to react on choices made inside the form.

[caption id="attachment_75085" align="alignnone" width="479"]WebEngage: Feedback Form In The Making WebEngage: Feedback Form In The Making[/caption]

Though it has a clear and unmistakable name, Feedback can serve more purposes than I can come up with now. Take it as a form for job applications, for example. You could even allow applicants to upload their resumes. Let your visitors provide you with new ideas, hints, tipps. Whatever useful might come from the outside world into your digital home, Feedback will be able to take care of it.

In one word: WebEngage Feedback is the simplest customer support tool ever. It let's you build your own support form and gets you up and running in minutes.

WebEngage Notifications Push News To Your Visitors

The just recently extended module Notifications is a dream for every store owner and marketers alike. Besides being able to inform visitors about the coming spring sale or the maintenance downtime of your website in the next two hours or the fact, that your visitor has reached you with an outdated browser, you can enhance the revenue stream.

Think of a new customer. This customer has found your shop and put quite a few items into the shopping cart, yet has not shown any activity in the last 30 seconds. As you will not want to lose that prospective buyer you would be happy to be able to push him a little, just like a salesman in a real-world shop would do. "If you take these items, I give you a 10% discount on everything," might be what you would want to say.

[caption id="attachment_75088" align="alignnone" width="479"]WebEngage: Classic Notification Live On Site WebEngage: Classic Notification Live On Site[/caption] [caption id="attachment_75089" align="alignnone" width="479"]WebEngage: Classic Notification In The Making WebEngage: Classic Notification In The Making[/caption]

"Not possible", you think? With WebEngage you should think again, as this is exactly one of the lots of possibilities Notifications has to offer. Notifications are always helpful, when and where you want to push a special information to your visitors or a targeted subset of them, which can become as small as one individual.

Probably you're selling globally, while not all global areas convert equally strong. With Notifications you could target special areas with special offers. So while your revenue in the United States is stable on a high level, you might want to offer massive discounts to buyers from Asia, to strengthen your market share there. Or the other way round: your home base is in the United States and while selling globally you want to reward the buyers located closest to you and offer discounts or free shipping or a free, star-spangled teddy bear with every order...

WebEngage's Tools Are All Accessible From One Dashboard

Besides providing you with all the described possibilities and many, many more I didn't describe, WebEngage incorporates a full-fledged analytics tool. Think of it as a Google Analytics focused on customer satisfaction. Every tool has its own detailed statistics area in the dashboard, from where you control the behavior of all of WebEngage on your website.

[caption id="attachment_75087" align="alignnone" width="550"]WebEngage: Targeted Notification Based On Product Chosen WebEngage: Targeted Notification Based On Product Chosen[/caption]

From the dashboard you create your forms, you design your surveys and notifications. There is a gallery of ready-made layouts and there is the possibility to craft your own CSS. A relatively new JavaScript API gives you even more control over the behavior of the tools inside your website. This way, you could attach a survey to a UI element and define the survey be opened on click on the given element, again, for example. Possibilities are far from limited. Did I mention that the form builders offer drag and drop functionality?

WordPress users seeking to empower their site to benefit from WebEngage are encouraged to not put in the code snippet manually, but rather to use the dedicated WordPress plug-in, available via WordPress Extend.

WebEngage provides detailed instructions for the implementation of the code snippet into other systems, such as Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce, Blogger and Tumblr as well as the default implementation into any given HTML document.

WebEngage: Who And How Much!

The WebEngage team consists of six people and is based in India. It managed to acquire a solid funding and is growing fast in terms of the numbers of customers. In a little more than one year, WebEngage managed to convince almost 7,000 customers. With their product getting better by the hour, their growth is constantly accelerating. Some compare them to 37signals even.

With a small team, expenses are manageable. This might serve as a valid explanation for the customer-friendly pricing policy also. While it is getting more common to not offer any free plans any longer, WebEngage still has this account in store, a question of manners.

[caption id="attachment_75083" align="alignnone" width="550"]WebEngage: Callout Notifications Make Sense Attached To UI Elements WebEngage: Callout Notifications Make Sense Attached To UI Elements[/caption]

"Serious" work can be done with the "Standard" plan for 49 USD per website and month. This plan includes the whole feature set I described throughout this article, while only lacking on some custom targeting features. If you need the latter, 99 USD for the "Premium" plan shouldn't ring expensive in your ears.

All plans, except for the "Enterprise" plan, which has to be negotiated as to its pricing, have their limitations foremost in regard to quantities. Active surveys are limited from 10 to 500, responses are limited. Just look at the comparison table yourself. For smaller websites I would recommend the "Basic" plan for 15 USD per month, if only it had custom styling capabilities, which it doesn't.

So I advise you to choose the "Standard" plan. You won't go wrong there and can of course always upgrade to the next level. But before you decide to buy a pig in a poke, go ahead and sign up for a 14-day trial of your desired plan.

Related Links:

  • The most powerful in-site customer engagement suite for your website | WebEngage
  • How WebEngage works? | WebEngage
  • The Pricing Table | WebEngage
  • Thoroughly Maintained Company Blog | WebEngage

Dieter Petereit

Dieter Petereit is a veteran of the web with over 25 years of experience in the world of IT. As soon as Netscape became available he started to do what already at that time was called web design and has carried on ever since. Two decades ago he started writing for several online publications, some well, some lesser known. You can meet him over on Google+.

3 comments

  1. Hi Avlesh. Thanks for the flowers. A few days ago I happened to stumble upon your website while I was actually googling for something entirely different. But WebEngage literally drew me in and after a few minutes I was stoked. Doesn’t happen too often. So I had to write this review ;)

    @all: I can only encourage you to take a look at this project. It is worth your time. I promise!

  2. Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting. Will take a good look at the site this week and see how I can integrate it into my offering.

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