Sean Cho
August 5, 2022
•
7
min read
So you've optimised your SEO to rank #1 in SERPs, your PageSpeed score is 100 and you've maxed out your PPC budget, but yet your website isn't converting visitors! Why? To get the kind of conversion rate that you'd like, you need to transform your website into a lead generator instead of just attracting visitors.
High converting websites share one thing in common: they're all laser-focused on delivering the best possible customer experience (CX). How do you do this on your website? You can start by actively engaging and talking to your visitors. Stay with us and learn more as we reveal the following 7 high converting secrets (plus 1 bonus).
What is conversion?
Firstly, what do we mean by "conversion"? Conversion is not just about converting a prospect to a paying customer or making a sale. In marketing, conversion is much broader and includes persuading a visitor to do something on your website, such as subscribing to a newsletter, signing up for a trial account or booking a demo.
Traditional inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a tried-and-true strategy that uses SEO, content and social media to attract visitors to your website. Next, conversation rate optimisation (CRO) techniques are used to convert these visitors, such as putting CTAs above the fold, writing persuasive copy, using testimonials and designing for mobile devices.
However, implementing CRO best practices does not guarantee that you'll convert a greater percentage of your website visitors. What worked for another website, or in the past, may not work for you.
The problem is that the traditional pairing of inbound marketing plus CRO does nothing to engage, delight or surprise your visitors.
Introducing conversational marketing for digital commerce
When people have a question, a typical workflow is to call a phone number at the website or send a message via a contact form or email. However, the phone number may be a local number that will cost international visitors money (in addition to the time zone difference). Plus, it sometimes takes days to get an email reply!
Conversational marketing engages your website visitors in one-to-one real-time dialogue. Unlike AI chatbots, live agents humanise the interactions by asking questions, listening and building relationships. When you personalise the entire customer experience you move prospects through the buyer journey a lot faster.
Conversational marketing is well and truly here to stay. Forrester observed that 42% of online shoppers said that it was important for retailers to offer live online chat on their websites. And global conversational commerce spending is expected to grow almost sevenfold by 2025, amounting to some $290 billion!
Now, let's see how you can use conversational marketing on your website to start influencing prospects and their decision-making process.
Secret #1: Interact with website visitors
To start interacting with your website visitors, you need to install a web widget from a CX platform such as CINNOX. It's easily embedded into your website without needing a web developer or complicated coding, is fully customisable to match your website's look and feel, and sits quietly in the bottom right corner until it springs into action.
A CINNOX smart greeting can proactively show a welcome message when visitors land on your website. In a study by Gartner, customers ranked proactivity highly for its impact on customer effort and loyalty.
The smart greeting is dynamic and you can customise the message based on your page content—just like a tour guide for your website! The greeting tells visitors that they can connect with your agents through web calls or live chat.
In addition, to live agents, you can also program AI chatbots to answer routine enquiries like FAQs and help out with lead qualification, so that your agents can focus on more value-added and challenging interactions.
Secret #2: Be available at all times
But what if you want to start conversations outside of your website? Or if your visitors want to continue the interaction without being on your website all the time? With CINNOX you can generate QR codes and web links, publishing them anywhere you want. Prospects can click or scan these links to connect directly with agents.
For example, if you're running email campaigns for your new restaurant, you can insert web links in your promotional email that will make a web call to your reception so customers can make enquiries and bookings. You can also put a QR code on advertising flyers and posters to be scanned by any mobile device. Like a CTA button, you can measure the effectiveness and success of your campaigns with these links!
Secret #3: Provide omnichannel service
The widespread use of social media and chat apps has changed consumer behaviour and communication preferences. Customers now prefer to interact with a brand using their favourite channel. When agents switch between chat, email and social channels—sometimes asking prospects for their phone number so they can call them on a landline—this leads to a very disconnected customer experience.
Gartner predicts that 50% of brands will fail to consolidate their communications channels in a post-COVID era.
CINNOX's platform unifies both web and traditional telephony channels such as live chat, web and voice calls, video calls, email, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE and Facebook Messenger on one platform. No more toggling between different apps! Your agents can also seamlessly jump from a chat to a video call to build rapport and humanise the customer experience even more.
Secret #4: Easily manage multimedia
One reason why content marketing is such a successful marketing strategy is that content is specifically created to address every stage of the customer journey. Not every website visitor follows the journey sequentially: some may start with a free demo, jump to comparison guides, and then read your latest blog posts.
If prospects want to skip navigating your website's content and directly ask your agents for more information, your teams can share files like images, videos, catalogues and even voice messages in CINNOX. Your agents can also share screens to go through a datasheet together, for example, or to give an on-the-spot product demonstration.
Secret #5: Anticipate visitor enquiries
When visitors to your website send an email or fill in an online contact form, your agents sometimes have to engage in a little fact-finding to understand their initial enquiry. Things like their name and what products or services they're interested in have to be exchanged over email or phone, lengthening the buying process.
CINNOX shows you the full browsing history of prospects when they visit your website. So if prospects are browsing pages related to new property launches in Australia, your agents will focus on this country and not homes in the UK! Plus, you also get a lightweight CRM that shows you the following details:
- Where the enquiry came from: location, IP address
- Which channel: web widget, web link, QR code, WhatsApp, Facebook
- What device was used: web or mobile
- Which browsing language they are using
Agents can get even more information by adding a pre-chat form and offline support form to gather more details such as their names and email address.
With this information, agents can focus on personalising the customer experience. For example, if you are marketing an apartment project for sale and you get a chat enquiry that is outside of your country, your agents can pre-empt the prospect's enquiry by preparing PDF floor plans and pre-recorded promotional videos to be shared with the overseas prospect.
The data displayed in the chatroom can be used for fault management, detecting insecure faults and preventing potential risk or loss. If a customer calls your agent, for example, to extend their credit limit, an initial Know Your Customer review using the enquiry location and IP address can be performed, preventing false claims and minimising potential bank losses.
Secret #6: Get a holistic perspective
Previously, it was easy for customer interactions to fall between the gaps when agents had to toggle between multiple apps or even use their personal mobile phones to chat via Facebook Messenger, for example. This meant that the next agent would have no record of previous interactions with the prospect or what was said.
With CINNOX you get a unified view of all customer interactions in a single chat window. When this holistic view of the entire customer journey is combined with enquiry labelling, your agents can pinpoint areas where there is friction in the conversion process or if prospects have shared sentiment or common pain points.
For example, if you're getting a lot of enquiries from Spain for your tropical holiday home sales, your agents can create a label for this country. If enough labels are filtered in the enquiry report, you can serve this overseas audience better by creating a landing page in Spanish, route to agents that speak the language, and even welcome them with a Hola! smart greeting!
Secret #7: Connect with the best agent
Typically, prospects may need to repeat themselves a few times before they finally get transferred to a suitable agent. Or they may be speaking or typing in their preferred language, looking for someone who can speak their language. Others may prefer being served by the same agent and not having to deal with a new one each time.
With an intelligent tool like smart routing, you can create tags to help visitors identify which team they should contact. For example, a "Sales - Spanish" tag will target visitors from Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, built-in language routing can automatically direct visitors to agents based on their web browser's language.
Other clever features like sticky routing and engagement binding create a bond between a prospect and the agent, ensuring that future enquiries and calls are directly routed to a familiar face. Not only does these build relationships but it gives people a consistent customer experience and makes them feel like a VIP.
Bonus secret #8: Give your agents superpowers
A long time ago, contact centre solutions were usually born out of incremental upgrades to legacy systems. Plus, departments were probably using different apps that met their own needs. All this created data silos where departments, systems and apps didn't talk to one another—and no one had a complete view of the customer!
We left this bonus secret for last as the same CX tools used to create delightful customer experiences can also be used for your teams. Agents can collaborate more effectively to move prospects along the customer journey by using conference calls, enquiry forwarding, file and screen sharing, and the mobile CINNOX app.
CINNOX digitally transforms your business by uniting your teams around a single view of the customer. In a study by McKinsey of over 900 companies that underwent a digital transformation to improve their customer experience, many saw results of 15-20% gains in sales conversion and a 10-20% boost in customer satisfaction.
You get a real-time web dashboard showing all the customer and team collaboration taking place. Built-in reports and analytics provide you with insights about visitor calls, chat enquiries and team engagement, plus you can monitor chat enquiries in confidence and take action to ensure service quality and the best possible experience.
Let's say, for example, there's a chat enquiry about the interior design of a new apartment. An agent can transfer the enquiry to another agent onsite in the showflat who is using the CINNOX app. The agent can then jump to a video call, give a real-time walkthrough, share photos, and send a list of units that are still available for sale.
