How do I get potential customers to talk to me?
In this article we're going to take a look at a problem nearly all early-stage founders face: Getting feedback (and sales!) from potential customers.
Then, we're going to solve that problem by making a few quick tweaks to your live-chat widget* that should make your landing page visitors at least 5x more likely to talk to you.
And that means a 5x faster iteration time, 5x earlier product/market fit, and 5x more sales.
Let's look at the problem...
You're working on a project. Maybe you don't have any customers yet, maybe you already have 100. But, in the early days, chances are you don't have the kind of crazy budget necessary to drive lots of (relevant) traffic to your landing page.
So it's really important that when a prospective customer arrives on your landing page, you solve all of their objections and enable them to buy your product/service.
Yet in these early days, you're still working out what these objections are.
And the only way to do this quickly is by talking to your prospective customers. But how? You don't necessarily have their email addresses or phone numbers. And it's not like many people reply to these emails anyway.
Enter the live-chat widget.
Live-chat widgets are a great way of building trust with your visitors and helping them overcome objections to become paying customers. They are also a great way to get feedback and learn about your customers, your messaging and your product.
In fact, prospective customers are over 60% more likely to visit your page again if you have a live-chat widget.
But you probably already know most of this, and we're not here to talk about why you should use live-chat - we're here to talk about some quick wins to make it 5x more effective.
It's time to steal an old-school trick from the offline world...
Odds are, your live-chat widget looks something like this:
A generic greeting which pops up a few seconds after a visitor lands on your site. Or maybe you don't have a pop-up at all, and it's up to the visitor to start a conversation.
Now, I want you to imagine for a moment that your landing page is a normal, bricks-and-mortar clothes shop. And your live-chat widget is the shop-assistant working there.
Let's say that you visit this shop for the first time, without knowing what they sell. How do you respond to the shop assistant if, three seconds after entering the shop, she asks you if you need some help?
It's a bit overwhelming, right? Your gut reaction is to say something like "no, I'm just browsing, thanks," and scurry off.
And that's why great shop assistants do two really clever, subtle things:
- They wait to approach you until they notice you would probably appreciate the interaction, and
- They ask open-ended questions (ie questions which get you talking, not ones you can easily answer with "yes" or "no").
Because a shop assistant who approaches you after you've picked up a shirt and asks "what occasion are you thinking of buying this shirt for" is much more likely to get you talking, find out useful information, build trust, and make the sale.
The good news? It's really easy, quick and effective to implement the same tricks with your live-chat widget**!
Last year, I was working on a product and landing page for booking on-demand photographers. We had decent traffic and in-person sales, but not much was happening sales-wise via the landing page.
It took me about 20-30mins to make the changes below and, ceteris paribus, my response rate, feedback rate and conversion rate increased by roughly 500%.
Here's the three-step process for you to follow:
- Step 1
Go through your landing page and identify 'action points' where you can guess pretty accurately what a visitor's mindset is (eg if they're hovering over the features section of your site for a while, they're probably thinking about how your product works in detail)
- Step 2
For each action point, define the most likely objection or knowledge gap the visitor is experiencing. So for the features action point from Step 1 for example, the main objection might be that the visitor is worried whether your product plays nicely with their CRM integration (just a random example).
- Step 3
Write some code*** or set a rule which causes the live-chat widget to open when the visitor activates the specific action point from Step 1. Display an "open ended" message to the visitor which is likely to engage and help them.
So continuing the example from Steps 1 and 2, your message which activates when the visitor has been looking at the features section for five seconds might be something like: "Hey there - which features and integrations are most important to you? I'm a human who'd love to find out how we can help you succeed!"
And that's all! A simple tweak you can make in under an hour, but which should at least double your initial speed and success.
Planning on trying this out? It would be really cool to hear how it goes :)
If you find this article useful you should head over to FiveMinuteFounder.com and sign up for my weekly email: Actionable, concise advice to improve your startup/company by 1% each week. Only what you need to know, in five minutes, with examples.
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*You do have a live-chat widget on your landing page, right? If not, maybe check out this blog post by Kissmetrics, explaining how you're missing out.
**Now every live-chat software is different, so unfortunately my code examples wouldn't be much use here. I don't have a particular favourite, but Drift has a pretty generous free plan if you're just starting out. It's also easy to tweak via their API, which has pretty good docs.
***If you're using Drift, feel free to shoot me an email and I'll happily send over the client-side JS functions I wrote to do this, but honestly the Drift docs have pretty much everything covered :)