Dear chatbot,

As if you didn’t know, we are all over this conversational marketing thing like white on rice! It did not take Impulse Creative long to come to the realization that instant communication with a website visitor can help convert them to a prospect and client much faster. I have been working with our wayfinder bot for about 60 days now. Check out these results:

10% Conversion Rate from Chat to Meeting

2x Increase on Conversion vs Lead

You may be asking yourself, is this the death of the salesman?? Not at all! You need to think of this bot as the best assistant your sales team will ever have. Utilizing a chat function on a website is nothing revolutionary. We have seen it on the market for quite some time, but most are using it just like a form on the website or for help desk or order tracking support. Very few businesses are being smart with its chat functions. As in, smart enough that they can route the chat to a certain team or location, or smart enough that they can detect a bad lead VS a good one...I am talking really smart!

Placement, Playbooks and Persona’s

The ticket to making our chats really work for us is placement, playbooks and personas!  

Personas

Think about the people who are chatting. Where are they in your funnel? Most TOFU visitors are not trying to strike up a chat about what you do and how you can solve their problems. If I am still shopping, I don’t really want to talk to you yet. I don’t know if I find value in taking that kind of time. But, if I am further in your funnel and already know who you are or already decided I need your help/service/features/bookings, striking up a real time chat is the ticket to a faster sales process and a delighted customer.

Placement

Where the heck do you put the bot? We have been talking about our Drift bot on our YouTube channel everyday, and we tackle this topic a little deeper here. The idea being that if you place the bot on the right page, or have it pop up at a certain time, you have a better chance converting that visitor and moving them through your sales process. Too early and it's annoying, like the sales girl asking you what you’re looking for today as soon as you walk into a store. Too late and you may have missed your opportunity to convert and off they go to your competitor.

Playbooks

Playbooks are the “script” that the bot uses to determine if its a good lead or not. Are they looking for a job? Bot tells them to go to our careers page! Do they have a website need? Great,  we ask a series of questions to help determine again if its a good lead and if yes, then it will book a meeting on my calendar. It really is that simple!

Who is the human on the other end? At Impulse Creative, I answer the bot! Hi! It’s my face on the website and I see every single message that comes through. Test me out- I love a good 10pm chat about website design. Even better, I love booking meetings while I sleep. Having a business development or sales rep respond to visitors is best because, as I stated above, if someone is chatting, they want to move forward! What they don’t want is to get someone who cannot help them, then given a phone number or email address to ask these questions to. You are just using a glorified form at this point and quite honestly, you’re wasting everyone’s time!

Success of a Saleswomen

So, how have I personally found a conversion increase? Well, for starters and just to be transparent, we are still getting about the same conversion rate on our website forms as we were before we entered chat bot land. However, as previously mentioned, those visitors are not ready to talk to me! So we just do our normal marketing thang and let that play out as it always has. But when I get a chat notification, as I say all the time at the office, my armpits sweat. Like for real! I get so sweaty excited because I know I am about to have a real conversation with a prospect and hopefully gain a meeting from it!  

We have our chat bot set up to ask the first few preliminary questions (ask me more about how we can help you do that!) and I can either let it roll through the process (hello meetings being booked in my sleep) or I can choose to jump in, stop the bot and take over from there. I had one chatter give me access to their HubSpot portal via the bot and after a 30 minute meeting the next day, we had a new client. It was by far, the fastest  and easiest deal I have ever closed.

So, don't fear the bot or your sales teams jobs! Conversational marketing is here to stay and only makes the buying process more customized and helpful to your prospects. And isn’t that with this game is all about? Helping people find the right solutions for their needs?