We love chatting. It’s what we do all day – in person, with customers, with prospects and on Slack. For our small business customers, we are constantly working to help them have more live chat conversations with their website visitors and customers.
It’s hard to say specifically what will work best for each business, but here are some we’ve seen work for a wide range of clients.
Stylize and customize your chat window.
Make sure the chat window stands out and matches your brand aesthetic. If your chat window is boring and/or blends into the background of your website no one will ever see it. If they can’t find an easy way to contact you, they might just leave.
Cut out any lead capture fields in a chat window. Excessive fields can drive users away. You already have someone who genuinely wants to talk to you. Make it easy for them. Get those form fields outta here!
Make chat available for every page of your website. Users never know when they’ll have a question, so you need to be ready to answer at any step of the journey. And remind them now and again that you’re here and ready for their questions. This is known as a ‘trigger’– a super simple way to pop-up the chat window proactively after a certain amount of time. You can also specify pages for triggers. Consider triggering your chat box on pages where visitors have the most questions.
Optimize your user experience.
How does your site look on a mobile phone? If it doesn’t look awesome, now is the time to improve it because a growing majority of web traffic is coming from mobile devices.
Mobile traffic has been outpacing desktop traffic online for years now. Make sure you optimize your chat box for mobile, too.
How does the copy on your site look – especially on the homepage? Clunky copy can muddy a user’s experience and increase your bounce rate. You need copy that makes your value proposition clear and immediate to visitors. Get them interested. Help them visualize how your services will improve their lives.
It may be less obvious, but you could also add specific links on your website directing visitors to chat with you as a CTA (or maybe just in general use website copy to suggest that people chat with you).
Find a partner business for marketing.
Do you have a friend or contact who owns a business targeting a similar audience? Building a co-marketing partnership may be one way to drive more qualified traffic to both of your websites. Each of you have insights about your customers and audiences that will help craft a targeted offer or landing page that could drive more engagement.
Partnerships are great ways to start more conversations on social media as well. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn communities are always looking for thoughtful new fodder for discussion.
Boost your local presence online.
There are so many benefits of creating and maintaining your Google My Business profile. Especially if you’re a local business you can drive web and foot traffic by improving your Google page. Again, for local and geo-specific businesses there are many ways that optimizing your online presence can drive traffic. And you’re in luck – we wrote another blog devoted to this topic.
In addition to improving your Google business profile, consider submitting your website to other online directories of businesses like Yelp, Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and Business Journals are all great places to list your business.
Warm up old leads.
Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you may need to keep your prospects engaged over many weeks and/or months. Just because someone visited your website and opted-in to a newsletter a few months ago doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready to buy. Keep the relationship going and eventually those better educated prospects will come back to your website with buying questions.
Reach out to customers you haven’t seen in a while. Consider running a promotion exclusively for repeat customers as a way to thank them – and as a reason to reach out. Referral campaigns can be fun and effective ways to warm up cold communication lines: give repeat customers the chance to share an awesome discount with friends who have not yet used your product.
