Is Email Marketing Dying? [Part Two]

Methods of Collecting

1)      You can require that the user inputs his email address before the chat can begin

2)      The agent can answer part of the user’s question but refer the user to a document (PDF), which he can email to the user if the user gives their email address

3)      The agent answers all questions completely and at the end promotes the website’s newsletter, and encourages them to sign up

4)      The agent answers all questions and at the end, in return for the user’s email the agent sends him a free piece of valuable content (a lead magnet), which is on the topic of the user’s inquiry. For example, if the user was asking about different types of driveway pavers, the agent tells him he can email him over a Do It Yourself PDF file on paving stones. This is a great combo of content marketing, email marketing and web chat.

Other Uses

You can also have agents give users promo codes or special offers to give them an incentive to go from being curious to being a buyer.

This doesn’t mean to turn the web chat into pure advertising, of course the focus needs to be on helping the user and giving him the data he needs, but the agent should never fail to try to convert every web chat user.

Prices

Prices vary quite a bit, some web chat services are free, but most are paid. The average price for a decent, simple web chat service is $20 a month. More expensive and feature-rich services cost up to $100 a month.

Keep in mind that it is up to you to have staff standing by, online, to answer the questions of users. You can even do this yourself, if you are willing. Obviously you can choose what hours your ‘chats’ are open.

How to implement

Implementation is tremendously simple. The web chat service will give you some code to have pasted into your website. All you need to do is get the code, and have your webmaster paste the code into all the pages on your site.

Arguments Against Webchat

Some argue that although webchat does give the user a good experience by providing him with the data he wants instantly, it can have a negative impact on sales because it would curtail the amount of phone call inquiries, since there is no need to call. And, as mentioned above, the sales people have less control during a web chat since the user can always just click ‘close’ and run off at a whim. But on a phone call however, it is much less likely that the prospect will simply hang up.

Conclusions

If done properly web chat has great potential in converting curious web visitors into prospects; but only if the chat agents have a system where they can turn the chat users into buyers/collect contact info. If no such conversion system is in place, then phone call sales would likely diminish.