In a small business, anything you can do to achieve an edge in digital marketing makes a huge difference. Leads turn into sales conversations which will produce added revenue.
The more leads you can generate the healthier your business will be and the easier you’ll be able to sleep at night. At the same time, you may be wondering if another tool is really the answer. Small businesses have to focus and constantly chasing the latest marketing tricks and tools will not lead to scalable or sustainable growth.
So, an important question to consider when implementing a live chat solution for your small business is, “Will live chat really boost my digital marketing results?”
The short answer is: Yes. Absolutely, having live chat will improve your marketing ROI without creating interruptions in your existing workflows. Let’s analyze further on how this works.
The most important element in digital marketing is conversions, not traffic. Your natural instinct is to think everything on your site is great, but you simply need more traffic. This is not true. Traffic is a commodity. You can find traffic from a variety of places but how you apply your conversion strategy is what matters most.
The main purpose for generating traffic is to convert leads. And live chat powered by human agents on-duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week will help small businesses improve conversions. Live chat features like a programmable database of robust “Q&As” for instant responses to common questions, fully customized lead qualification and intake, CRM integrations, and appointment scheduling with calendar integration are all designed to help small businesses increase their lead-to-client conversion rates. Another key feature meant to help boost conversions is programming your live chat account to screen web visitors through a series of questions with an offer for an immediate callback with leads that have been qualified. This “chat to call” feature will prompt an instant notification to your team’s Slack channel with the web visitor’s name, phone number, and a link to the chat conversation so you can review it before making the call.
These features all work collaboratively to allow small business owners and operators to remain focused on productive work uninterrupted without missing any potential new clients.
Converting a lead is only part of the equation and does not directly lead to revenue. You also have to have a system for turning leads into sales. Live chat helps small businesses here too, because your AI-enabled chatbot will qualify leads on your behalf with a fully configurable playbook to respond to common queries. Businesses can use chat funnel metrics to optimize performance and improve their chatbot to better qualify leads.
Lead qualification is essential for small businesses because you don’t want your sales development teams wasting time on someone who you already know is a bad fit as a client. And for small businesses, wasted time leads to lost revenue. When you are able to handle the initial qualification up front, you can be much more specific in offering solutions as the prospect moves further down the funnel.
The less obvious, but crucial benefit of live chat for small businesses is you are able to dig deeper into the pain and concerns of your potential clients. By offering your leads an option to directly engage with you via chat, your business can find out a lot more about what they were looking for and what they have in mind.
By learning what the clients ask for most, you can improve messaging and speak directly to the pain of your clients.
Many businesses use their chat function as a starting point for building out FAQs since they find patterns in the questions asked.
This intelligence that comes from your web chat solution is far superior to what information you can get from a static form on a website.
Overall, the difference is crucial for small businesses and implementing live chat can be extremely simple and improve your marketing ROI.
Start chatting with your leads and clients today!
Samir Sampat is a Marketing and Events Associate with Smith.ai. Smith.ai’s 24/7 virtual receptionists and live chat agents capture and convert leads by phone, website chat, texts, and Facebook.
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