With increasing number of businesses turning online, there is an ever increasing need to be pro-active with customers. It has become no more a luxury to know what customer wants, but more of a necessity to subtly ask questions along the way and gather feedback.
VisitorEngage, currently in beta helps online businesses get feedback, surveys and push messages on websites. They do have extensive set of features in each of these categories. For feedback & surveys, the website owner can drag and drop feature to install, perform full customization, download reports and can go with ‘white label’ feature. On the push notifications front, various kind of targeting is possible, via cookies, action, time-based among others. With the capability to have a live preview of the changes, the website owner can see the changes they make to the surveys or push notifications live, as they create or modify them.
One notable feature of visitorengage is Industry’s first SLA (service level agreement). With 24/7 support and 99.95% guaranteed uptime, the team promises money back guarantee with no questions asked.
VisitorEngage has been founded by Jagan Ganti, along with his close friend Satish Kanisetti (whom he knows for more than 8 years now) . Earlier, Jagan had been a product marketer at ClickDesk for 2 years before bootstrapping VisitorEngage.
TTP catches up with Jagan to understand the real USP of VisitorEngage, initial traction and near future plans. Read on!
Real time user conversion is not new and we have established players like WebEngage doing it since quite some time now. Why VisitorEngage?
[pullquote align=”right”]We are trying to bring in the product much better, easy to use, affordable and robust than trying to figure out how we differentiate in terms of features[/pullquote].I don’t really buy that ‘First mover advantage’ in this SaaS world anymore. The segment leaders in any industry today aren’t the ones who came out first. The market size is very huge (ecommerce size estimated at $6Trillion) and I have to admit that having products already in the existing space made things simple for us with idea validation.
It’s about execution at all levels and there’s enough scope for anyone to enter the market with a decent product and strategy.
Though real-time conversion isn’t new, it’s completely evolving by automating the process based on visitor’s actions, history and behavior on a website. That’s the secret sauce.
I think the USPs in SaaS are shifting. Would like to quote my answer on Quora:
> In a SaaS startup world you ‘ll only have 1-2months time advantage with your new feature as USP. If that feature gives any signs of bringing sales to you, your competitor will bring it in 6 weeks flat. So, stop worrying about “innovative” features as USP. At the end, everyone in the industry will have the same set of features. Engineering is cheap these days.
> Think about USP in the lines of – uptime guarantee or money back, no questions asked refund policy, smooth cancellation process, onboarding mails signed by the founder ceo (change those noreply@ automated mails to your email address, support mails that do not sound like bot replies. Always establish a connect with your target audience, speak their ‘language’ & be where they are (twitter?). These are hard to copy and are the real USPs. It’s about how well they know you. Have a go-to story.
How has been the traction so far in beta? What strategies did you adopt to get maximum signups for beta?
Created a simple launchrock page and started sending out emails to everyone I know in the industry. We weren’t validating the idea here and as we had already finalized on what we were going to build, so I didn’t bother much with getting ‘maximum’ signup emails. Once the product got ready, I emailed, telephoned and sent unsolicited emails and follow ups (the way I did this makes another story) to startups and early adopters I can think of. The response rate and feedback is good.
What is your biggest challenge in getting the product to beta stage?
[pullquote]Staying focused is the single most challenge since we began working on the idea.[/pullquote] There are heaps of tasks involved while starting up. Prioritizing and staying focused is important. Drawing a line on where to stop coding and getting the beta out to the market is important. We built this in a record time. There’s always a feature you wanted to add to the product before you show it to the public, but that can wait. Seriously.
From the day #1 we finalized on the domain, we knew that people bring outright comparison with WebEngage, so we had to make sure we meet that expectation at the product level and hopefully we did that. With the next planned feature releases, we will be adding in and experimenting with some innovative features.
What does the future roadmap look like?
Besides few minor product enhancements, we plan to build plugins, 3rd party integrations, detailed analytics, remarketing and a/b testing modules. We are also actively gauging feedback on VisitorEngage and the roadmap is big. Prioritizing on what to build first happens after we hit some decent initial numbers.
TTP’s take on VisitorEngage
Jagan’s answer on VisitorEngage’s USP has been one of the best we’ve heard so far. Differentiating on features looks like a passé, and finally it boils down to the customer experience you create in terms of product simplicity and delivery. The market is definitely there, and with effective pitching and highlighting the differences between VisitorEngage and existing platforms, it would be a good start for the team.
