Make It Easy for Your Website Visitors to Talk to You. Here’s how.

While conversational marketing automations and chatbots are the in thing these days, here at Convert we steer clear of fads that take the focus away from what truly matters — our customers.

I recently completed Drift Insider’s Conversational Marketing Certification. It inspired me to take a closer look at the way I do my job as a Customer Advocate at Convert and how I engage with our visitors. It prompted me to analyze these interactions and work on removing any friction along the way, to ultimately offer a better, more seamless user experience.

One of the things that stood out to me in the course was learning how to make it easy for people to talk to you. This could be as simple as adding a meeting booking link in the chat so that people can reach out on their own terms. This practice can also extend to the entire process — the chat, the agent behind the chat, and the messaging (whether or not this is automated).

Making it easy for website visitors to talk to you doesn’t only mean responding to incoming questions or comments — that would suggest that you’re being reactive. Instead, loosen up a little and be more proactive, by giving them something to comment on, or something to ask about. Be the conversation starter. Ask questions. They have come to your website for a reason, so it only makes sense that you start the conversation and find out the best way to help them.

Then, following up and meeting those expectations could become the reason they return or convert.

And that is why chat greetings are so cool. You can customize them based on the page the visitor is on, whether they are a returning or new visitor, and so on. Although it doesn’t have to get complicated, it does require deep thought and a structured approach because you wouldn’t want to say “Welcome back!” to a first-time visitor. Or “Thank you for checking out our pricing page”, when the visitor is actually on your About page.

Here’s what you might see on the Convert website when you come back to our website:

If you’ve come back to our website a few times, you’ll see this:

If you happen to stumble upon a 404 page, you’ll get this:

You get the gist.

Presenting website visitors with a personalized chat greeting prompts them to respond and to start thinking of things they want to ask.

I like to think of it as people coming over to your home. First, they knock to get your attention — they came to your door for a reason. Now, unlike the world wide web and its information — you wouldn’t have the slightest idea why the person at your door is there. Unless, of course, you saw the courier vehicle parked outside or you were expecting someone. But for the purpose of this (unexpected) analogy, let’s assume that you don’t know why there is a knock on your door.

Second, in the real-world scenario, you open the door to greet them. If you don’t greet your visitors, you’re deemed inhospitable. So what do we do? We ask how they’re doing and what brought them by, right? And so the conversation evolves and we can identify where (and if) we can help. If we can’t help, we take it upon ourselves to point them to the right person or resource. Content aside — if the visit and conversation were easy, friendly, and engaging, then you have done good ‘entertaining’ your visitor and they won’t have a problem coming by again.

In the virtual world, the most common practice is to have chat greetings on high intent pages, such as the pricing and features pages. Having a chat greeting on every single page of your website can lead to chat requests from visitors that never intended to explore your product, and more spam, overloading your team with concerns and questions that will never lead to conversions. Not that some visitors are any less important, but brands still have to be strategic about time and resource allocation. Adding a meeting booking link in a chat greeting allows visitors to book a call at a time that suits them, but how valuable would that call be if the meeting requestor isn’t a qualified lead? How much money would your company be losing because your Account Executive has countless 30-minute calls a week about plans and pricing with different individuals who have not been sales qualified?

Bots have taken over a great deal these days. However, at Convert, we haven’t gone that route… yet. We might in the future if chatbots manage to marry clever automation with genuine support, but that’s still in a distant future. We pride ourselves on providing a human interaction experience. Bots may help a great deal with allocating chat query types, drilling down to the specific question or issue, and so on, but they still have a long way to go to become genuinely conversational. As a chat guru in a SaaS company, we are super clear on what our primary CTA is and our team can handle it. We keep it simple and easy to talk to us.

So… click on the chatbox on the right side of your page and let’s chat!