I’m Back and Interactive

January 22nd, 2009 Chris Posted in Marketing, Web, Web Site | 1 Comment »

After a long holiday break I’m back. And my New Year’s resolution is to be committed and regular on the blog. Not a great start give it’s the 22nd…

Anyways…

Last fall, Colleen and I heard a guy speak at a conference. His name eludes me but what he said didn’t. He started a very successful on-line dating site and his advice was to focus your efforts on getting people who visit your web site to interact with you personally as quickly as possible.

That stuck with me and just a few days later, I saw a talk about Live Chat. It was a shameless sales pitch, but I couldn’t help but think that there would be a lot of value in proactively asking visitors to your web site if they are finding everything they need.

In case you’ve not experienced it, live chat is like instant messaging, but for the web. You can chat back and forth with an operator in a browser window. It can be initiated by the site visitor or by the operator.

I couldn’t help but think about the analogy of a retail store. Would you have a brick and mortar store without any sales clerks. No one to help shoppers find what they need or answer any questions? That would be insane.

So we bit the bullet and have now implemented live chat on the engageselling.com site. And the results have been great. We had such a reaction in the first couple of weeks that I had to go in and limit the number of simultaneous chats as Casey (in our office) was going insane trying juggle five conversations at once.

And one of the features we really like is that if you stay on a given web page for a certain amount of time (ex. 2 minutes), you are automatically prompted to see if you have any questions. Just like in a real shop!

We’ve even made sales with the chat.

Long and short, we’re going to be doing several things to make our on-line presence more engaging and more interactive – so we can quickly move from a prospect only browsing to a potential client interacting with us personally.

<rant>

OK, while I’m talking about live chat, I must share my frustration with some of the vendors servicing the entrepreneurial market. The gentlemen I mentioned above who was pitching his live chat solution was charging $3K plus $80 a month. It came with scripts and set up instructions along with the on-going chat service (the actual back end is hosted in most solutions). Long story short, he got everyone riled up, because live chat makes sense, and made a bunch of sales.

I tend to not make impulse purchases when it comes to the business (or in our personal life according to Colleen) and so while she was half way to the stage with her credit card in hand, I said Whoa. Instead, I did some reseach over two evenings and found that what the gentlemen was selling at the event did have industry leading features but he was reselling someone else’s service.

I found and contacted the service directly (god bless google) and got the exact same service for no money upfront (vs. $3K) and $79 per month.

The moral: always shop around… (the way I figure it, Colleen owes me $3K)

</rant>

C.