In the heyday of Email people would open over 90% of all email received (Back when everyone was on AOL). Receiving an email was exciting and curious. Twenty years later the open rate have drastically fallen. People would open any email, whether they had opted in or not. Nowadays people who opt-in for your email newsletter list don’t even open them. But who can blame them? They are assaulted with spam emails from unscrupulous marketers, and scam emails containing viruses from hackers. Spammy marketers and scammers ruined email marketing.
The average open rate for emails is now around 20%
The landscape has indeed changed.
What’s next?
Email marketing is still being used successfully by many companies. But in view of the declining statistics let’s take a look around the web and see if we can find a budding new alternative which hasn’t been ruined by marketers and scammers.
Web Chat
Ten years ago we started seeing a few websites which had their own customer service web chat embedded into their website. You could ‘click to chat with an agent’, a window would pop up and then you’d be able to ask them all your questions via text chat. Since then more and more companies have gotten on board with this technology and have employed them in their sites.
Why Web Chat?
In our new internet age, people want answers now. If they are on a site, and are looking for information, they would much rather click open a little chat box, type their question and get the response right back; as opposed to filling out a contact form, and waiting 12 hours, or calling the company.
Additionally, being on a web chat puts the customer under the control of the agent handling the chat. Of course this is less control than that of a phone call, but there still is control present. Therefore, web chat becomes another method of contacting customers (like email marketing) and putting them into your sales funnel. It is passive, we have to wait for them to click on the ‘chat with us’ button, and then we have them.
Sales Potential
Don’t let the idea that web chats usually used for ‘customer service’ keep you from seeing the potential for sales. Anyone who starts a conversation on your web chat automatically becomes a prospect. Therefore, a clever company will integrate their ‘customer support’ chat into their sales funnel.
There are several ways this can be done. But first, it is important to realize that once a person closes the chat you have lost them forever. Therefore, it is important to arrange a method by which you can capture some of the contact info of your web chat users.
These people can be contacted in the future by email (it seems we can’t escape email marketing) and given more information. This builds a decent quality list because the person 1) opted in and 2) was interested enough to ask you questions about the product. Or instead of email they can be called, or written to; regardless of what contact method one chooses the people who use your web chat service should get integrated into a database for future profit maximization.
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