Introduction:
Lack of trust in brands has made things much more challenging for marketing & sales teams to execute their job. Truth is, consumers naturally are skeptical about purchasing things from unknown vendors because it’s in our human nature to do so.
However, this changes with the use of live chat as it creates a direct conversation between the buyer and seller. This in turn builds trust and mends the bridge between offline & online purchases. In order to grow, modern businesses must adopt a holistic acquisition and retention marketing strategy that helps them build a loyal customer base that sticks around for years.
Tips on how to leverage live chat for marketing and user acquisition:
- Target high-intent pages: Identify the pages on your website that are most likely to attract visitors who are interested in your product or service. These pages could be your pricing page, product page, or any other page that has a high conversion rate. Once you have identified these pages, make sure to add live chat functionality to them.
- Lead with a question: The goal of live chat marketing is to get website visitors to engage with your brand. One way to do this is by leading with a question. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, you could ask visitors if they need help finding a specific product.
- Set achievable goals: Not all campaigns will be successful right from the start. Set achievable goals for your live chat campaigns and monitor their performance over time. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t.
- Monitor, test, and improve your chats: Monitor your live chat conversations regularly to identify areas for improvement. Test different approaches and see what works best for your audience.
- Rely on chatbots — but be transparent about it: Chatbots can be a great way to automate some of your live chat conversations. However, it’s important to be transparent about their use. Let visitors know when they are talking to a bot and when they are talking to a human.
Why do you need a customer acquisition strategy?
Whether you are a startup or a large-sized organization, gaining new customers for your business is necessary to increase your revenue. It’s this top of the funnel momentum that leads to all future growth for your business.
Additionally, a burgeoning customer base makes for a good business case, acting as proof of traction for your company to investors and the outside world.
Proven customer acquisition strategies & tactics:
Find your niche:
For your business to acquire new customers, it is most important to identify the potential users for your product or service. The reason is simple — people don’t want to be bombarded with unnecessary advertisements or useless information. So, unless your product solves a universal problem, you are better off finding the exact niche it serves.
Pick the right acquisition channels:
Once you have defined a target audience or audiences, it’s time to choose the right channels to engage and acquire the potential customers that you have identified through market research.
There are several acquisition channels — SEM, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Facebook advertising — to choose from as you look to grow. But finding the one that works best for your company is a game of trial and error.
Make use of video content:
Today, in the world of decreasing attention spans, you can’t expect your visitors to read through lengthy paragraphs of information. In fact, a recent study from Microsoft found the average human attention span to be a mere 8 second.Since most users generally skim through content, huge blocks of text aren’t the best approach to hook your site’s visitors.
Embrace content marketing:
Content marketing remains one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies at your disposal. By creating quality content that genuinely helps users, not only do you give your users a clear idea of the value they’d gain from working with you, but you also carve out thought-leadership for yourself in the market.
Create a referral program to reward loyal users:
Building a referral program is a proven way to bag new business through your customers. While many customers are growing distrusting of brands, at the same time, consumers prefer to rely on the advice of their friends and family.
Use optimized landing pages:
A successful page directs consumers to your product or service, offering specific and valuable information that compels them to take some sort of action.You can always use a landing page builder or an A/B testing software to improve your landing page design. Try pages with different fonts, CTAs, and other elements to understand what’s gelling best with your customers.
Personalize emails for better engagement:
Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with both your leads and your existing customers.
For example, you can use long-form content such as white-papers and e-books on your landing pages in exchange for a user’s submission of an email address.
Once you have a list of emails, you can send a segmented email to these users to gently push them along the sales funnel. Of course, the content you share in your emails will also depend upon the location of a user in the sales funnel.
Conclusion:
Customers are the lifeblood of your business, and acquiring new customers is vital to help your business thrive and bloom. However, there’s no straight-jacket formula to guarantee a steady flow of customers.
In addition to customer acquisition, it is also vital to focus on retaining your existing customers as the customer acquisition cost is often much more than retention. By investing in an advanced customer service platform that integrates features such as live chat, you can provide speedy and efficient support to your customers, improve your marketing efforts, and gather feedback for product improvement.