Connecting with your prospects: How to talk to your website visitors?

Communication with website users is critical to drive conversions, and this should be factored into your website’s design from the beginning. Prospects should be able to contact you as soon as they become interested in your services. Email or phone is not the quickest and most convenient way to talk to prospects, so let’s dive into more efficient means of communication.

Here are the most common communication methods. We’ll dive into each of them in later sections.

• A basic contact form, where the prospect enters their name, company, email, and phone along with a short message
• Chat with a human, directly on the website
• An automated chatbot, with a fallback to chatting with a human

A simple contact form lets the prospect submit their contact information, with the expectation that a member of your team will reach out to them in the near future. You can have contact forms on multiple pages of your website, for example if your company has multiple offers. Contact form submissions can then include the name of the page they were submitted from.

The most basic contact form is just that — a form with no extra steps beyond the submit button. But, you can take this a step further and add a brief questionnaire to your contact form. For example, pick your team size or pick your budget.

People don’t like spending a lot of time on contact forms, so keeping it short will get more submissions. On the other hand, a multi-step form can give you a qualified prospect that is more likely to purchase your product or service. Try to find the right balance for your situation.

Enabling prospects to chat directly with a human is the most complicated path, especially if you need 24/7 communication. That said, this is the most efficient method if handled by a salesperson. Experienced salesperson can turn a prospect from real-time chat into a customer in less than an hour.

However chat with a human might not be what you need if your prospects reside in a different time zone. In this case, the chatbox is like a subpar contact form — the prospect leaves their question, and you contact them later.

Adding an AI-powered chatbot to your site enables your communication experience to be live 24/7. The chatbot will be trained on your company’s data so it can provide information about your services and answer basic questions. If a salesperson happens to be online, the chatbot can connect the prospect to the salesperson after it has qualified the lead.

The hardest part of using a chatbot is the training phase. You need to provide the model with as much data about your business as possible, and the data needs to be well-structured. Very often the training part requires extra efforts from your in-house or contractor engineering team.

Chatbots are fairly reliable and can accurately present information about your business. However, they’re not as good as a real salesperson.

It wouldn’t be a mistake to implement all three modes of communication we’ve discussed in this post. This lets the user choose the method they are most comfortable with. We recommend starting with the easiest communication method, and adding the others as you progress. Remember that there must always be a human somewhere in the loop, since AI chatbots can’t sell.

At the end of the day, the goal of communicating with your prospects is to provide them with a streamlined buying experience that delivers value to your business.