Genius.com Launches E-Commerce Store To Aid Users In Upgrading Functionality
- Written by Demand Gen Report Team
- Published in Feature Articles
Genius.com today announced the launch of its e-Commerce store, in addition to an enhanced self-help center, to help marketers in smaller companies ease the addition of automation tools and functions.
The new online store is designed to enable users to upgrade their Genius accounts to meet growing email marketing and demand generation needs. Similar to a BtoC e-Commerce transaction, users can select their product needs and add them to a shopping cart, submit credit card information and complete the transaction. The account changes are added within 12 hours.
Genius.com Director of Marketing, Matt West, told DemandGen Report that the new offering is aimed at catering to the changing needs of marketing automation in a timelier, more seamless fashion.
“With these smaller transactional pieces, from a customer perspective, they can go through whole evaluation process, which is timely and cost money,” he said. “A lot of times, customers don’t want to talk to salespeople and they don’t want to be sold to, so it breaks down that barrier for them…Buyers’ needs change as they grow into the product, but when those changes happen, sometimes it’s an event, or a need to get an email out tomorrow, but users don’t have the email budget. They may need to add several users quickly. [The e-Commerce store] helps it take days out of the process.”
The e-Commerce store has been in beta for one week, and has already yielded several transactions, West said.
In addition to its e-Commerce store, Genius.com also has upgraded its self-help center, striving to automate the help experience with customized FAQs, videos, screenshots, tutorials and demos. The more prescriptive resource center ups the ante on frequently asked questions, as the questions and answers received by the Genius.com call center are categorized and indexed within Wordpress, enabling users to click through and filter for information. West said the company plans to roll out this feature in a live feed through the company’s Facebook and LinkedIn portals.
West said the new additions build on the growing need to break away from the one-size-fits-all approach in automation technology adoption. “[The e-Commerce store prevents organizations from having] to actually get on the phone and talk through what a product does,” he noted. “People understand what our product does at this point, and are more willing to go through the self service process. As the space has grown, the small business space has been untouched. Most of the automation companies want to stay far away from it because it’s small and transactional…by having an e-Commerce option in there it allows us to get out there and make these transactional purchases happen for the masses. It’s not just about catering to a different kind of customer — it’s about allowing them into a system that otherwise rejected them. The parallel between the help center and e-Commerce site is really to cater to the masses.”