By: Joanna Ellis-Escobar —
Attracting more potential customers to your franchise website can boost your search ranking, helping you to be more competitive. And once visitors are actually there, live chat solutions provide a real person to answer their questions immediately, allowing you to turn these anonymous visitors into qualified leads. Understanding the value of these services can help you promote your company and its services more effectively and can substantially increase your profitability. Here are four tips for capturing leads more effectively in the online environment.
Tip 1–Help Potential Customers Find You Through Content and Promotion
Parting ways from the old, interruption-based marketing methods, Inbound Marketing uses relevant, information-rich content to attract prospects’ attention. Start with engaging stories and testimonials on your website, in addition to explaining the benefits of your offering. Provide links to your website and company contact information in blogs and articles you post. Expand your presence in the Internet community by participating in online forums and commenting on posts. In all of these activities, be sure to include a live chat button. In essence, you’re providing something of value to those who need your solution, as well as a live person to answer questions and gather contact information.
Tip 2–Avoid High-Pressure Tactics
Capturing leads is a delicate process. Pressing too hard or too fast with prospective clients can scare them off or leave them with a negative impression of your franchise and its products. Working with an experienced live chat service provider can ensure the right approach in these situations and can allow your franchise to stand out from its competition. Data indicates that live chat interactions provide greater prospect satisfaction than telephone, email or forms, leading to higher conversion rates.
Tip 3–Minimize Customer Effort
In a similar vein, the ability to answer prospects’ questions immediately through live chat allows you to capture valuable contact data and increase conversion rates. Consumers are on the whole unwilling to provide extensive personal information in the online environment. They also may balk at lengthy contact forms that take too long for them to fill out. Giving prospects the quick and easy live chat alternative to lengthy form completion alleviates this problem and can go a long way to helping them feel more comfortable with and connected to your franchise operation. This can allow you to reach a wider audience in the consumer marketplace and can help you achieve the most effective lead capture rate from your online marketing efforts.
Tip 4–Time Is of the Essence
When your company does capture leads, responding quickly can make the difference between landing a sale and losing business to another company. It’s critical to compliment your lead capture capability with a timely, efficient lead processing capability to ensure this valuable asset is not wasted..
As a leading managed live chat services company, Chat 24/7 Live delivers around-the-clock personnel support for your franchise to ensure that inquiring prospects can reach you anytime, night or day whether through your website, banner ads, social media pages, email campaigns, blogs or newsletters. And when they do, you’ll be able to answer their questions, learn who they are and convert them from anonymous visitors into customers.
