What would you do to a salesperson who just gives out a brochure of your product to people on the street and just stands like a statue? I would just FIRE HIM.
Your website is your salesperson and has a single job to do – to bring in new leads and make sales. And most companies these days just create a plain static website which does nothing more than act as an expensive digital brochure. Having a proactive website, which actively helps your visitors increase the quality of the leads and revenue by 25%.
Conversational Marketing
Conversational Marketing is the new style of marketing coined by Drift, a popular chatbot service for your website. Traditional websites usually had a contact page that visitors would have to search for and then fill it up. That would trigger an email to you, and you can reach them out to start a conversation.
But nowadays you can embed a snippet of code in your website and your visitors are shown a small chat widget in the lower right corner of the page. You can customize the message you want to display based on various parameters like the page URL, time spent by the customer, etc.
And whenever your customer responds to the chatbot, the bot would provide them with links to relevant articles in your knowledge base. If the visitor wants to reach out to a human, the chat conversation gets routed to your support staff and they can continue from there.
Though there are much more involved in conversational marketing, these are the basics.
How to get most out of your chatbots
Here are 3 basic tips that would take 5 minutes to implement and also get many more leads from your chatbots.
Make your bot more proactive
Your visitors wouldn’t probably know you have a chatbot. Your bot needs to make the first contact with your visitor.
In all chatbot services, you can control when your bot gets triggered based on rules. Typically, if a user lingers around in the features or pricing page, pop a chat window and ask them if they would like more details.
Show them some basic questions based on the page the visitor is on and keep the conversation going.
One thing online marketers understand is that as long as the visitors actively keep engaging with your site, they tend to be highly qualified leads. Someone who is just checking out your site, wouldn’t waste time chatting with a bot.
Always ask for email through your bot
Even though chatbots and facebook messenger are hot, email still is important to reach out to your leads – especially if you are selling a SaaS product. You can’t throw out emails completely.
In your chatbot conversation, after the user has asked something, ask the visitor for his email address.
Something as simple as “I would be happy to help with that. But can I get your email address in case we get disconnected?”
This one line is sure to get more email addresses and leads into your system. You can experiment with different reasons to ask for email addresses like giving a coupon code or signing up for a giveaway or sending a free PDF report.
Have a Human backup
Remember, even though bots are getting very popular, they can’t replace humans yet. Think of bots as someone that your salesperson can outsource the mundane tasks. When it comes to closing the sale, you are going to need that human.
During your working hours, have a few support staff check your chatbots and see what visitors are online and maybe strike up an actual conversation with them. If you are an early stage company, I would suggest everyone, including the founders to chat with your visitors to know what they expect and how you can improve your website/product.
Adding that personal touch would increase the engagement and the number of leads you get.
Conclusion
Even if you dislike chatbots, it has become an important tool for your website. Be sure to add them on a few pages, experiment with it and see how the number of leads you get increases.
Are there any other creative ways you have used chatbots on your website? Comment below.
Srini is an entrepreneur+developer who realised launching a successful product is much more than building cool features. He has helped numerous startups and businesses build successful businesses for the past 13 years.
