Category: proactive chat for website

Inbound marketing strategies to grow your business: I

Inbound marketing refers to the technique of drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Inbound marketing provides information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers the valuable information they desire via company sponsored newsletters, blogs, and entries on social media platforms.

We have mentioned a number of inbound marketing strategies to grow your business:

1. Leverage the power of keywords:

In order to rank higher in SERPs you need to identify the most relevant keywords and optimize your content accordingly. This will help you to successfully gain traffic for relevant keywords if you use those keywords on your site. So, you need to focus on keywords, specifically long tail keywords that are important. Having a quality website and content optimized for SEO ensures that Google’s web-crawling technology is able to identify and index your site’s content to have it appear for free to people searching and rank higher in the search results.

2. Social media interaction:

This is an era driven by social media. These days, potential customers find companies, follow those companies, and interact with those companies.Since there are real people behind every like and share, so, in order to connect with those people, you need to ask questions, answer questions, respond to tweets, and be a presence. Each of these social mentions provide an opportunity for your business to interact with the mention, thereby increasing its brand image and its reach into other social networks as well.

3. Use guest blogging:

Guest blogging is a new way to promote your web blog or website. In this strategy you may post your article or blog on others blog by getting their permission. Guest Blogging is used by bloggers to increase traffic for their blog by posting published blog on other blogger’s blog.

Lead magnets for an efficient conversion: III

1. Demonstration:

In case of marketing, a product demonstration refers to a promotion where a product is demonstrated to potential customers. The sole purpose of such a demonstration is to introduce customers to the product to make them familiar with it in hopes of getting them to purchase that item. The products offered as samples during these demonstrations may be new products, new versions of existing products or products that have been recently introduced to a new commercial marketplace. Basically, the idea is to introduce your offerings, utilize them as lead magnets and demonstrate their capabilities.

2. Creative contact forms:

Creative contact forms are a better version of contact forms that you offer to customers. They are used to enhance the effectiveness of simple contact forms by using them to showcase your company’s personality. You need to be conversational and inviting to your audience.

3. Out of the box deals:

You may offer free two-day shipping or deals such as buy-one, get-one-free and much more in order to lessen the purchase anxiety that every customer experiences while purchasing. Since, it adds value to the transaction so it is an effective lead magnet.

4. Forms gating charges:

Consider gating price and other information if your goal is to target hot leads. Hiding your pricing behind a form can be an effective tactic as this particular form will help filter out unqualified leads, and capturing their information will help you follow up with targeted prospects.

5. Tests:

Tests or quizzes encourage prospects to measure themselves against your expertise or industry standards. This will give you an opportunity to give feedback and ideas. Also, the prospects will determine their need for your product or service.

6. Limited-time free trial:

Give prospects the opportunity to experience the benefits of your product or service, including a deadline to the offer at the same time. This will make them realize they can’t go another day without it.

7. Cheat sheets:

They are generally very short and cut straight to an ultra-specific point and can be delivered as checklists, mind maps, or blueprints. Mostly, they are just a page long in length.

8. Resource list:

A toolkit or a resource list is an easy to consume lead magnet. Depending on your niche, toolkits can be a good introduction for your target audience making them familiar with your products and in most favorable cases increasing sales and building long-term relationships.

Lead magnets for an efficient conversion: II

1. Coupons and offers:

Discounts on the existing prices can prove to be the most effective lead magnets because consumers can easily price-shop for products. You can offer coupons and enticing discounts on your products and services so as to generate leads.

2. Loyalty programs:

Loyalty programs are structured marketing strategies designed by merchants to encourage customers to become long term customers and to continue using the services of businesses associated with each program. These programs cover most types of business, each one having varying features and rewards schemes. In marketing a loyalty card, rewards card, points card, advantage card, or club card is a plastic or paper card, visually similar to a credit card, debit card, or digital card that identifies the card holder as a member in a loyalty program.

3. Free reports:

Free reports include whitepapers, e-books, articles, and guides in the form of lead magnets. Your aim should be to provide compelling information to make a valid value exchange between your prospect and your business.

4. Webinars:

Webinars are educational, informative or instructional presentations that are made available online, usually as either videos or audios with slides. Since webinar attendees connect online, they can use Internet-based technologies to like communicating through instant messaging, file sharing, using a whiteboard collaboratively and interacting through social media sites in order to enhance the experience.

5. Podcast:

Podcast refers to an episodic series of digital media files which a user can set up so that new episodes are automatically downloaded via web partnership to the user’s local computer or portable media player. The distributor of a podcast maintains a central list of the files on a server in the form of a web feed that can be accessed through the Internet. Files are stored locally on the user’s device such that it can be used even if he/she is offline.

Lead magnets for an efficient conversion: I

As mentioned in our earlier posts, a lead magnet is an incentive in the form of free e-books, webinars, whitepapers or something of that sort given away to someone in exchange for their email address. It can even be considered as a bribe that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address, or other contact information.

There are a number of lead magnets that you can employ to capture traffic and convert efficiently. Some of them have been mentioned below:

1. Drip marketing:

Drip marketing refers to a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. Drip marketing is carried out in various forms such as:

i) email: This the most commonly used form of drip marketing is email marketing due to its low cost and high efficiency.

ii) direct mail: This technology relies on digital printing, where low-volume print runs are cost efficient and the variable data can be merged to personalize each drip message.

iii) social media: Various social media marketing tools employ the principle of drip marketing to schedule a series of updates.

2. RSS feed:

RSS refers to rich site summary and uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information like blog entries, news headlines, audio, video and much more. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author’s name. Once a user subscribes to a website, RSS removes the need for the him/her to manually check the website for fresh, updated content. This is because the browser constantly monitors the site, informs the user of any updates and can also download the new data for the user.

3. Membership:

People loved to be treated specially. So, all you need to do is invite them into your VIP group, and give them free information so they feel a part of your club. You need to know that loyal fans and followers have the power to convert others as well.

How to leverage PPC for lead generation: III

1. Resolve all your consumers’ queries:

Most of the questions of consumers are born from their uncertainty of availing of your product. Their inquiries include everything including your prices, difficulty in setting your products up and other sorts of queries. Make it a point to answer all these questions right away even before the questions or objections have been cast out. Side by side an F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions) list will exempt any doubt or objection they may have that is hindering them to sign up as a business lead or a customer. When you offer a particular brand, product or service, you should expect consumers to throw all sorts of questions or even objections regarding your offerings.

2. Track your lead generation efforts:

Make use of conversion tools offered by different providers to track the conversion rates of your lead generation efforts via PPC. As a matter of fact, if you don’t track your conversions you won’t get the clear picture of your lead generation campaign and that can be harmful to your business. You can employ conversion tools offered by various providers including major PPC networks like Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising which offer conversion tools of their own to help you track your lead generation efforts.

3. Provide 24/7 assistance to the consumers:

By putting in a contact number or providing a live chat facility you can help dispel any doubts or apprehension your visitors may have about your product or service after clicking on your PPC Ad. Also, it helps people are find ways to distinguish the real service providers from those who are not and contacting them directly through phone or live chat. Convincing your visitors that you will be there for them whenever they need your assistance deepens their trust in you, thus, making it beneficial for you.

4. Show gratitude through a Thank You page:

Once all your required transactions have been completed, you may lead your visitors to the thank you page. This page can be utilized to:

i) increase brand awareness. to upsell other products or lead them to your social network group or community

ii) upsell other products

iii) lead them to your social network group or community

How to leverage PPC for lead generation: II

1. Ensure relevance between your PPC ad and landing page content:

When online users have queries related to a particular topic or want to know more about a product or service, they search the required information using specific keywords. Also, if your ad is focused on the desired certain keyword or topic, it is expected that your landing page would provide more information about that particular keyword or topic. The users would definitely be turned off if your landing page content talks about everything else except what’s mentioned in your PPC ad. Therefore, your content should be optimized in such a way that it entices landing page visitors to become a lead or a customer.

2. Employ convincing tools to support your ad claims:

For effective lead generation support your PPC advertising campaigns with evidence. This will help you gain the trust of your target audience. You may employ convincing tools such as customer testimonial, slideshows, white papers, and eBooks. these tools could support your claim as a reputable product or service. You can also feature prominently trusted seals from organizations or agencies that will increase your credibility, gain your targeted audiences’ trust, and convert them into long-term customers.

3. Entice your visitors with giveaways:

You may entice your visitors by including rewards and offers that you would give them in exchange for their sign-up information to a blog or newsletter. These giveaways may include webinars, ebooks, videos, presentations and more. Make sure that these rewards and offers are well-designed to give your web visitors something of value that will tempt them to know more about your brand, product or service. Also, it is suggested that you place your offers near your lead generation form, with customized graphics and text that will convince people to make a response to a particular call-to-action.

How to leverage PPC for lead generation: I

Pay-per-click marketing refers to the way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website, rather than earning those clicks organically. The basic idea is, every time your ad is clicked, sending a visitor to your website, you pay the search engine a pre-decided fee.When your PPC campaign is well-designed and running smoothly, the visit is worth more to your business than what you pay for it. PPC has the strongest potential of helping you achieve your goals, so, you need to know the tactics that’ll help you leverage PPC for your business:

1. Landing page is the way to go:

Firstly, what actually is a landing page? It is a single web page that appears whenever a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement is clicked. You should direct your prospects to a well-designed landing page instead of your homepage. The landing page usually displays directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser’s conversion rate. You can actually leverage your landing page to generate a direct action from a website visitor that will convert them either as a business lead or a paying customer. The key here is to directly go to the point and focus everything there in your landing pages with the only goal of lead generation in mind.

2. Put up relevant fields in your contact forms:

Your forms should be focused only on the most important items that you need to know and avoid form fields that would ask a bunch of questions that are really not that relevant enough for your purposes. Since, lead generation forms are created for an important purpose, and that is to collect important information about a web page visitor and convert them into valuable leads. Therefore it becomes very important to have your forms designed with lead generation as its primary focus.

Tips for an effective online chat: II

1. Transfer chat sessions when required:

Since individual agents may have different areas of expertise, so, provide them with a list of other agents and their levels of expertise. This helps in cases where a chat agent is involved in a conversation that has got to do nothing with his current level of expertise. Such that, without much ado, he quickly transfers the chat to another agent ensuring that the customer is aware of the transfer.

2. Make use of typing indicators:

Your live chat software should include typing indicators. It should enable the agents to see a customer’s words as they type, and issue an alert when the customer has hit the “send” button. This feature gives the agents insight to what the customers are thinking as they type and also allows the respective chat agent to respond quickly without making the customer wait for long time periods. The alert should be audible, visible, or both such that it lets the agent know that a customer is awaiting a response.

3. Program targetted pages to raise chat offer:

As a matter of fact, just raising the offer to chat is enough to convey a sense of goodwill. Allow customers to browse on your site for a time before raising the offer to chat. Identify a list of target pages where you want to increase the conversion rate, and program them to automatically raise the chat offer after a period of 30 – 60 seconds such that the customers get enough time to be oriented for the chat.

4. Create a set of professionally designed canned messages:

Customers should be greeted professionally when they arrive within a live chat conversation. Professionally designed canned messages can be employed for this purpose. Carefully worded standardized canned messages can be used to automate parts of the conversation and augment your professional profile in order to greet the customers with courtesy.

5. Employ CRM tool along with online chat:

All your chat agents should have access to customer sales records. Integrating online chat with CRM tool allows them to update the CRM records at the end of a chat session.

Tips for an effective online chat: I

These days customers are increasingly using live chat as a communication channel to interact with websites to get instant help in case of any queries. Here are some tips to leverage online chat in order to reassure lead nurturing:

1. Offer a copy of the transcript to the customers:

Customers contact the live chat agents so that their queries are resolved instantly. The whole chat process provides them with valuable information. But, most people don’t record every conversation so this information can get lost or can be rendered futile. So, provide your customers with transcripts at the end of live chat sessions.

2. Include chat button in email campaigns:

This feature allows your customers to provide direct feedback on questions they may have regarding the email they’ve received from you. Emails could be anything from periodic newsletters or follow-ups to individual questions or grievances and embedded chat button along with it provides an ease of instant query resolution.

3. Provide chat agents with previous chat transcripts:

Providing your chat agents with a chat history for returning visitors allows the agents to come up to speed on issues that the customer discussed previously, and to proactively follow up with any questions. This will hasten up the live chat process and customers will appreciate the fact that they don’t have to repeat their previous problems to newly assigned chat agents.

4. Initiate an automatic response:

The only way to guarantee a quick response is to accept all incoming chats immediately. Once a customer initiates a chat session, the system should accept the chat automatically and convince the customer that a chat agent will respond shortly. Pre-canned messages can be used to welcome the customer and let him know that action is taking place immediately.

5. Inculcate pre-chat survey forms:

Pre- chat survey forms allow customers to set the direction of the conversation. They include questions that allow your chat agents the necessary background so they can provide a quick and courteous answer. The pre-chat survey forms also allow you to quickly route the chat session to the agents who are most qualified to handle the respective conversations.

Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: III

1. Arrange weekly meetings:

Arrange regular meetings for knowledge sharing. The basic idea is to discuss and understand the overall experience of your support agents with your clients. Try to understand what obstacles they face while they carry out a live chat with the website visitors, what kind of tricky questions customers may ask and how to resolve their queries. Agents can uncover important techniques of live chat support in this knowledge sharing process. This can aid in improving their overall performance.

2. Club videos with training sessions:

As a matter of fact, humans are visual learners. They tend to learn things more effectively if taught through graphics and videos. You don’t need to spend extra bucks on video tutorials. There are thousands of useful videos available on YouTube which can be utilized for this purpose. This is one of the best customer service training ideas that gives tremendous results.

3. Help them know their actual roles:

Yet another concept of your training should be to help your chat agents understand the actual role they need to play in building customer relationships. Educate them about the lifetime value of a customer as well as the consequences of a bad customer interaction. Let them know how the quality of customer support impacts on sales conversion, customer retention, and brand image. Once the support agents have this basic understanding, they will be more efficient in providing top-notch service.

4. Train them practically:

Practicing something practically helps you learn it better. Team up all of your agents and assign them different chat scenarios. Encourage them to try their best to deal with those given situations. Give them enough time to understand the whole support process, your products/services and most importantly, how to manage the live chat software. These practical sessions are very important to cultivate a capable workforce.

Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: II

1. Review your live chat agents’ performance:

Make it a point to review your live chat agents. Their training should include mock chats, secret evaluation and much more. Apart from that, distribute customer success manuals amongst your agents where all important tips and techniques of online customer support have been mentioned in written format. This will help them to go through the important tips whenever they have any doubts.

2. Inculcate tech support along with live chat:

In order to create a power-packed support environment make use of live chat features such as canned messages and links, the ability to push files and screen sharing and co-browsing. Also, train your agents to go slow and ask short, simple questions to get to the root of problems and to make solving them easier and faster. More important than training your agents to provide tech support is ensuring they have the resources they need readily available. Ensure your tech support agents are provided with canned links for knowledge based articles, how-to tutorials, videos and other resources they need to help customers resolve issues or problems instantly. Make sure the agents know how to find the resources quickly and then send them to the respective customers whenever they need them.

3. Help them to be platform experts:

LIve chat agents need to have thorough knowledge of the platform they are working on and the tools they are dealing in. When chat agents are familiar with the tools they are utilizing while assisting customers, they perform tasks with a higher level of confidence. Task your agents providing both a customer and organization friendly experience when chatting. It’s important to be fully trained on all customer and agent facing platform features. For this purpose, customers might be presented with a pre-chat survey while initiating a chat request, which gives the ability to choose the reason for wanting to communicate.

Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: I

Today’s era is an era of digitization. These days the purchasing decision of any customer is not only based on the quality of your offerings but also on the quality of your customer service and support. Customer support refers to the process of building a healthy relationship with your customers by convincing them that you value them and you are there whenever they need you.Thus, the quality of your support service can improve or destroy your brand image and ultimately your business revenue. So, you need to train your live chat agents with the right customer service skill. Here, we have mentioned some of the customer service training ideas!

1. Good product knowledge:

Educate your support agents about the products and services you provide. Good product knowledge not only improves the support speed but also helps to build a much stronger, long- termed relationship with the customers. If your chat support agents lack the knowledge of products and services you are dealing in, they will tell customers to hold for a while for finding the solution or transfer the chats to a more knowledgeable person, which becomes time-consuming. Therefore having proper knowledge shows confidence and builds trust amongst customers.

2. Good writing skills:

Live chat provides instant assistance to anyone visiting your site. Customers utilize the live chat option as it is the fastest way to interact with companies in case they have any queries. A key component of a live chat interaction is the agent’s ability to exercise good writing skills. Utilize the auto spelling and grammar check feature of your live chat platform to ensure efficacious agent communications. Tell them to keep sentences short and to the point. Agents must be able to write as if they were talking on the phone in order to keep the conversation flowing by mixing free form and canned messages. Interject the customer’s name while chatting to personalize the conversation and take care of punctuations.

3. Refrain from taking things personally:

There are instances when the customers are not in a good mood and they interact in an unexpected manner. Teach your support agents not to take those things personally. Complaints are gifts from the customers. They contain customer insights and are a great way to know what exactly are their opinions about your offerings and support quality. Tell them not to lie to the customer. If they don’t have the answer just admit it. Ask your live chat agents to spend some more time with the website visitors and dig personal info like customer’s hobbies, liking and disliking and so on. In this way, the conversation will be friendlier and the person on the other side will feel comfortable and relaxed.

Qualified and unqualified leads

The sole aim of individuals involved in digital and outbound marketing and sales is to segment leads into, one of two categories – qualified leads and unqualified leads. Leads can switch from one category to the other with the aid of nurture campaigns.

A qualified lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in a product or service and meets general buying criteria.

A qualified lead is a person:

i) with need, budget, and purchasing authority.

ii) Working for a company that meets your customer profile for being a customer.

iii) With a buying timeline that falls within the time horizon of the sales representative’s commission plan.

It only takes a few minutes for a true sales professional to qualify a lead. And lead qualification can be done anywhere at a busy tradeshow or on a golf course, provided you have an efficient marketing team.ave completed, or are in the process of

Basically, qualified leads are the ones which have completed, or are in the process of completing your nurture campaign cycle.

Qualified leads are in control of their own buying cycle, completing self-education research who have brainstormed and listed their exact needs in a solution. They have a clearly defined budget to work with and are researching solutions within their means. In addition to this, they have low churn rates because they close on their own terms.

On the other hand, unqualified leads are the ones who have not been nurtured enough to close their sales cycle. They are often unsure of what your company offers and don’t know what they’re looking for in a solution. Unqualified leads may also be the ones for whom your product or service is out of their price range. Though it is possible to convert unqualified leads into customers, the churn rate is comparatively high.

Lead nurturing tactics: III

1. Sales and marketing alignment:

For sales and marketing alignment, the shared expectations, responsibilities and goals for this collaboration between sales and marketing should be outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Creating a formal sales and marketing SLA will help the two teams hold each other accountable for converting leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers in the long run.

2. Multiple touches:

According to a research, on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until they’re a closed won customers. The most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing common questions and concerns such that they are contented.

3. Maintain permission to keep prospect updated:

Maintaining permission to keep a prospect updated is important because if a prospect loses interest in your messages, they’ll disengage by unsubscribing, marking your messages as spam, or emotionally unsubscribing – reflexively ignoring or deleting your messages.

4. Guide your prospects efficaciously:

There is a possibility that a potential buyer who you’re nurturing may not enter a buying process for a long time. But during the lead nurturing phase, if you can educate prospects and guide their thinking to incorporate specific requirements and ways of thinking about the market, your company and solutions will be much better positioned in their minds when they finally decide to make purchases.

5. Study the Digital Body Language:

Digital Body Language is the aggregate of all the digital activity you see from an individual. Each email that is opened or clicked, each web visit, each form, each search on Google, each referral from a social media property, and each webinar attended are part of the prospect’s digital body language.Just like the body language is read by a sales person managing a deal, digital body language is an amalgamation of all the digital touchpoints. Digital Body Language can help you understand where your prospects are in their buying process. As they progress through the process, they’ll reach a point at which your lead scoring system tells you they’re ready to engage with the sales process.

Lead nurturing tactics: II

1. Build a retargeting audience:

Retargeting is a paid medium. A retargeting audience may be built in any of the 4 following ways

i) Select marketing content – this is what will be displayed to your audience.

ii) Pixel based interactions – this audience is built by placing a pixel on your website that uses cookies to track online visitors, helping you remarket to them.

iii) Contact list segments – this audience is defined by a segmented contact list you already have in your database

iv) “look alike” contacts – these are outside contacts who are similar to those who have engaged with you, offering a way to exponentially increase the numbers of impressions made.

2. Make timely, well-researched calls:

The best way to convert inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities is a timely followup email or a phone call. When you make a timely, well-researched call to an inbound lead, you know exactly what the prospect is researching based on his/her recent browsing behaviour and you also have enough information about the prospect to initialize a research about the organization they work for and their specific role within the company.

3. Personalized email marketing:

You can further improve your lead nurturing strategy by personalizing your emails. You can send triggered emails when someone downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits certain pages on your website, or when they demonstrate a high level of engagement in order to be in touch.

4. Offline marketing:

Offline marketing refers to strategies that utilize offline media channels to create awareness of a company’s products and services. These campaigns may include radio and print advertising – including billboards, signs and pamphlets,telemarketing, and television ads.

5. Lead scoring:

Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is utilized to determine which leads a receiving function (e.g. sales, partners, tele-prospecting) will engage, as per the set priority. Lead Scoring allows a business to customize a prospect’s experience based on his or her buying stage and interest level

Lead nurturing tactics: I

Lead nurturing refers to the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers based upon their requirements.

1. Deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time:

An efficacious inbound marketing strategy requires strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content. In order to deliver the right content, to right people at the right time:

i) you need to understand each of your buyer personas

ii) you then need to cumulate targeted content designed to nurture each of your personas based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers.

iii) you need to have a marketing automation platform ready to help you identify, categorize and target your unique buyer personas for inbound marketing strategy.

Targeted content

2. Social media:

Social media can be leveraged for lead nurturing as it has the capacity to facilitate something all businesses want most – the ability to engage in 1 to 1 conversations with their target audience.

Social media for lead nurturing

3. Remarketing:

Remarketing is a clever way to connect with those visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website while browsing elsewhere around the internet. In other words, it is a form of online advertising
that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website.

Remarketing

4. Multi-channel lead nurturing:

According to a research, almost four out of five marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20%. Also, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. The main cause behind this poor performance is a lack of effective lead nurturing. Effective multi-channel lead nurturing refers to a technique that most commonly involves a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach.

Multi-channel lead nurturing

5. Provide a personalized website experience:

The likelihood of a person engaging with you further is greatly increased if you offer a much more personalized website experience. This can be achieved through smart content. With the aid of smart content, you can deliver content specifically tailored to where a prospect is in the buying process, or content targeted to people the very first time they visit. Smart Content lets you target content based on anything you know about your contacts through research.

Personalized content