You probably already know that building a website is just the first step to marketing your business online. The next steps involve driving traffic to your site, offering potential customers something that holds their interest, and then encouraging them to repeat their visit.
All too often, web traffic is compared to a leaky bucket: Even if plenty of visitors are showing up, many of them leave your site and never return. A continual stream of new traffic is required, in order to keep your “bucket” (of prospects) full.
Plus, you often miss the opportunity to gather any feedback from visitors, so you have no idea why they leave or what you can do differently to keep them engaged.
What if there were a way to plug that leak? You would retain more website traffic, keep your bucket full, and convert more visitors into customers.
That’s the idea behind chat bots, a new but relatively simple technology that you can incorporate into your site.
Bots capture your visitors’ attention
As visitors land on your website, the bot pops up to ask a few quick questions. Your visitor feels engaged, and the bot helps them to identify the information they’re seeking. That’s important, because web traffic moves quickly these days; if a visitor can’t quickly find what they need on your website, they move on and look elsewhere.
Bots serve as a lead capture system
Traditionally, we’ve relied upon contact forms in order to gather information on website visitors. While this method is still effective, we must hope that visitors feel motivated by whatever we offer in exchange for their information.
Chat bots motivate visitors to exchange information more readily, because they automatically pop up and engage with the visitor from the moment they land on your website. Many brick-and-mortar stores utilize greeters to answer questions and direct visitors at the front door; chat bots perform a similar function online.
Bots pre-screen your prospects
Now that your leaky bucket is plugged and you’re retaining more prospects, it’s time to convert them into customers. Bots can be programmed to ask and answer a series of simple questions, sort the answers, and present you with pre-screened prospects along with their contact information. Now you can contact visitors and provide them with more tailored information on your services, add them to your email lists, and invite them to follow you on social media.
Visitors appreciate updated, yet simple technology
Best of all, chat bots aren’t even all that difficult to incorporate to most websites. The most common versions piggyback off of Facebook messenger, a technology that most visitors are already using. And because chat bots can be programmed any way you choose, we can personalize the “conversation” to provide the exact information you seek on your prospects.
Contact us to learn more about how to update your website with a chat bot. We’ll help you plug that leaky bucket, and soon it will be overflowing.
