Customer expectations are very specific in the digital age. Speed is now a must in all transactions and even in customer service. Marketing automation helps businesses meet these demands, which are as important in the B2B world as they are in B2C. More significantly, it can make a B2B business more efficient and more effective in targeting prospects and turning them into clients.
Website Chat
Wondering why you would need live chat software? Well, there are so many reasons. The most significant reason is that with digital advances, speed is a big factor in customers’ buying decisions. Everyone wants what they want now and this also applies to customer service.
Research indicates that on social media the average response time for customer service requests is 10 hours. And email response times are often longer than 12 hours! This is a recipe for losing customers.
Live chat allows you to respond quickly to your customers. You can have real-time conversations with your customers while they’re on your website. Response times are 100 times faster than any other digital channel and it is super-convenient for customers.
Other Benefits of Live Chat:
1. Increase the number of sales and conversion rate
When you use a website chat you increase your potential to get more sales. The American Marketing Association discovered that B2B companies who used live chat see a 20% increase in conversions on average.
Live chat gives you the opportunity to immediately answer questions from potential customers and customers while they’re browsing your website. You can literally help them move past their objections and get closer to a decision. In fact, according to an eMarketer report, 35% more people made a purchase online after using live chat.
2. Increase average revenue per sale
Live chat gives you the opportunity to talk with your prospective client or customer and get an in-depth understanding of their needs. This means you can recommend similar products and services by up-selling and cross-selling to increase the average value of a sale.
Internet Retailer found that by using live chat software, Virgin Airlines up-sold customers with additional products and converted them 3.5 times more often and saw a 15% overall increase in average order value as a result.
3. Reduce the cost of client support
In contrast with the traditional model of customer service agents where only one call is answered at a time, research by Telus International reveals that agents can interact with people in as many as six (!) simultaneous chats, depending on the level of complexity of the issues to be resolved. This means your business can operate more efficiently with a smaller customer service team. What’s more, live chat is more than 50% cheaper than support via phone calls.
4. Build trust with buyers
It is more difficult to build a rapport with prospects online than it would be face to face. Even if you have a B2B business, you are selling to a contact person and human beings are naturally skeptical of buying things from people they don’t know. However, live chat allows you to have a direct conversation with your prospect so you can build trust. In a study from ATG into global consumer trends, 90% of customers said the “Live Chat” button gives them confidence that they can get help if they need it.
5. Satisfy your customers
Any business that wants to provide a memorable customer experience on their website, should consider using live chat.
According to an eDigital research paper, live chat has a 73% satisfaction level, the highest when compared to any other customer service channel, with a 61% satisfaction level for email and 44% for phone.
Kirk Parsons, a Senior Director at market research company, J.D. Power attributes live chat’s high satisfaction levels to “the efficiency and immediacy of the experience”.
6. Keep in contact with visitors
Of course, you won’t immediately turn every website visitor into a buyer but you shouldn’t let your non-purchasers slip through your fingers.
Before a live chat session starts, it’s best to ask the user for their contact information, including their name for a more personalized customer experience.
If the user isn’t already a customer, you can ask them if they would like to receive news and promotional material from your company. With a good email marketing strategy, you can turn these prospects into leads.
What’s more, it turns out that 63% of consumers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.
7. Get a competitive edge
You can stand out with live chat where your competitors are falling short. A study by Telus International found that many businesses are still not benefiting from the power of using live chat on their websites.
Content based off of a lead magnet
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is an interesting piece of content that you offer to your website visitors for free in exchange for their email address as a strategy to help you build your email list faster. Your lead magnet should be specific to your website visitors.
It is best to offer lead magnets from your own site or blog. Prospects can opt-in to receive the lead magnet through a website form or popup or a landing page. An email autoresponder delivers the content that was promised.
What Happens After Prospects Opt In
After your prospects opt in, they should receive an email sequence, which is a series of emails sent based on time intervals or automated email triggers that you set. Triggers include user actions like subscribing to your email list or downloading content.
Types of Email Sequences
Email sequences can be designed with different purposes in mind such as nurturing leads or updating clients. Regardless of the purpose, all your email sequences should help you build trust with your clients and aim to move them further down the sales funnel.
The content a prospect consumes in the form of a lead magnet indicates what they are interested in. You can tailor your email sequence to match that interest.
Retargeting Based on Facebook Pixel
What is Retargeting?
When prospects first visit your website, there’s a high probability they’re not going to make a purchase. They will probably leave the site and do some more research. They may or may not return to your website in the future.
Instead of leaving it to chance, advertisers will want to retarget or remarket to these individuals, reminding them about the product or service they were looking at on their website and inviting them to check it out again.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is also known informally as the Facebook retargeting pixel. It is a snippet of code you can apply on the back-end of all the relevant pages you want to track, create audiences, and remarket with. It is like other tags in that it helps drive and decode key performance metrics, but this one specifically helps you improve the ROI from Facebook.
Build Custom Audiences
Rather than defining audiences for your Facebook advertising campaigns by demographics or interests selected from the platform’s ad tool, you can create an audience using the people who have engaged with the page that your pixel is on, which is likely to make your campaign more effective.
Build Lookalike Audiences
When you want to expand the reach of a campaign beyond the people visiting your website, you can install the Facebook retargeting pixel. Using your custom audiences as a starting point for new audiences, Facebook will automatically generate Lookalike Audiences to be similar to the original. This way you can quickly reach ideal prospects like the ones in your custom audience.
Track and Improve Conversions
Installing a Facebook pixel on key landing pages will tell you who’s converting, which pages they’re visiting, and how much ROI your campaigns are delivering.
The Power of Email Segmentation
You will find that some people will respond to your lead magnets while others will take action based on your promotional emails. Yet another group will follow your emails that are educational in nature and build an awareness of your brand and offering. The more value you give to the contacts on your email list, the more responsive they’ll become.
One of my favorite segmentation strategies is asking a question within email to find out if their current revenue is less than $2000 or over $10,000/month and I create different offers based on the segment they’re in.
Each stage of your email segmentation process should reflect the challenges your target audience faces and the reason why they joined your email list in the first place.
Of course, it’s important to measure the impact of your messages so you know what’s working and what’s not. This is the key to improving your conversion rate.
Lead Scoring
My email marketing tool also offers lead scoring, which means that based on the actions my contacts take and the level of their engagement with my brand, such as opening emails and clicking on links, a specific score is applied to them.
Essentially, lead scoring is a method of ranking your leads to determine sales-readiness. This makes any business more efficient because your time is spent either fast-tracking those who can be considered a “hot” lead or nurturing “cold” or “warm” leads as needed.
When contacts reach a particular total score, I know they are ready for me to consider them a “hot” lead and reach out to them to move them closer to making a purchase or becoming a client.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, there are five key ways to see marketing automation make a powerful difference to your bottom line. Live chat reduces the expenses associated with traditional customer support and gives you the chance to act as a standby sales assistant, ready to hold your prospects by the hand as they move closer to making a purchase decision. In order to capture website visitors who may have left your site without entering your sales funnel, the best strategy is to retarget based on the interest indicated by the Facebook pixel on your site.
To effectively target contacts on your email list it is important to monitor which lead magnets your contacts opt into. In addition, email segmentation is crucial to nurturing your leads according to their demonstrated interest. Lead scoring helps to determine the sales readiness of each lead. Whether you use any or all of these marketing automation processes, you are sure to see a positive difference in your revenue.