Personalize Your Website with a Virtual Spokesperson

With the explosion of social media in 2009, customer interaction has become a focal point for online businesses. How to best interact and connect with customers is the questions on everyone’s mind to end the year. Making your interaction more personal is one way to do just that. Any small business owner looking to humanize their online customer interaction may want to take a note of this new feature released by SitePal. (For those of you who haven’t yet heard of or seen SitePal, SitePal is an easy-to-use web application, which allows small business to create versatile speaking avatars)
The new feature, called 3D Photoface, allows users to instantly create a lifelike 3D avatar by simply uploading a photo. You can script the avatar either by recording you own voice or using a built-in computer voice.
On SitePal’s homepage, you can see several sample avatars made from the 3D Photoface technology (even Mr. President has gone virtual!). You will be amazed to see how real these avatars look. You can try the demo to upload your own photo and create a virtual you in just minutes.

Some of you may argue “It’s cool, but I am not sure if it would work for me?” Well, actually there are several case studies and academic researches which prove the benefits of using avatars or virtual personalities in online commerce and education.
Avatars are said to be effective in engaging the audience, humanize the online interaction and also enhance the trustworthiness of a business. These benefits lead to increased business results, improved message comprehension, and strengthened customer loyalty.
Anita Campbell, the CEO of Small Business Trends, tested the SitePal avatar’s effectiveness on the site conversion. She set up two identical pages to generate newsletter sign ups. One page had a personalized avatar of herself, the other page had a static image of herself. The avatar-enabled version had 144% high conversions in less than 2 weeks. (See the case study)
Designed specifically for non-techie, small businesses budget, SitePal is easy-to-use, quick to set up, and affordable. With cost as low as $9.95 / month, business owners can create as many avatars as they want and update their characters and voice messages anytime. The update is dynamic and there is no fee.
SitePal also supports the Facebook publishing for small businesses who want to personalize their social media communication as well.
This post is a sponsored blog post.