Have you ever wondered what tactics your peers use to acquire new customers? And what technologies do they use to support these strategies?
If so, you’re in for a treat as Joe Leverson, the Head of Digital Marketing at Gamma discusses his technology stack and the journey to building a frictionless buying experience.
In this blog we’ll cover:
- How the lead generation form fill rates have dropped and how marketers can fix it using conversational marketing tools
- How to turn your website into a giant meeting room by removing friction
- How to build a tech stack that enables conversations, not hinders them
- The sucess and ROI of this appraoch
Joe heads up the digital marketing team at Gamma – a leader in supplying telecommunications solutions to businesses.
Gamma is in the business of helping organizations work and collaborate internally. And Joe is in the business of helping Gamma find prospective customers that require their solutions.
For years, Joe has led Gamma’s multi-channel customer acquisition efforts, spanning from digital lead generation initiatives to inside sales campaigns, all with the aim to drive qualified leads for Gamma’s sales teams.
The death of a lead form
The increased flow of website visits presented an entirely new challenge. You have prospects in the right frame of mind of wanting to have a conversation met with a lead generation form, which many prospects find too tedious to fill out.
For the past few years, we’ve seen a steady decline in what Joe calls ‘on page’ conversion rates. People are becoming increasingly more reluctant to fill out long forms because they’ve become accustomed to the friction-less experiences they get in the consumer world.
For example, you can open up your banking app and speak to someone pretty much instantly. But when you visit a B2B website, you are usually given a lead form to fill in without an opportunity to have a conversation – right there and then. To make matters worse, you usually don’t hear back for hours or sometimes even days. This is leaving lots of potential revenue on the table as the momentum is lost the more time elapses between them showing interest and speaking to a rep. And it creates friction.
A simple solution
The solution to removing friction is simple. Remove the middleman – the form that sits between the prospect and the salesperson. And replace it with live chat – or to use industry terminology, a conversational marketing platform.
This enabled Gamma to turn the website into a “meeting room” where prospects searching for UC solutions could speak to a member of Gamma’s sales team instantly.
Straightforward steps for building the right tech stack
- Make it easy for your teams to have more meaningful conversations
- Invest in a conversational platform, there are lots of “chatbot” platforms but focus on a platform that enables live, human to human chats to take place
- De-anonymize your web visitors
- With modern reverse-IP data providers, it’s possible to embed onto your website and integrate with live chat platforms to give your team using the software the best chance of having a relevant conversation with your site visitors – providing a much better end-user experience as well!
- Target them with relevant content
- By combing live chat efforts with contextual information, such as pages being viewed, you can tailor content delivered to website visitors to increase the chances of starting a conversation
- Keep a record and measure your success
- By integrating all of these systems and data into your CRM you can create a “full-funnel” picture of the success drivers of your marketing and live chat efforts to see what has really delivered success
The results?
By removing the friction and making it easy for the prospects to engage with Gamma, it saw a 33% increase in website conversions and almost ¼ more marketing qualified leads being generated.
Gamma has been operating this conversational approach to lead generation via their website for a little over a year now and in that time it has brought in some serious impacts to their top line figures.
The mix of conversion points has changed significantly, we have already touched on “the death of the form”, however; Gamma has seen a step-change in end-user preference for interaction on a website since the launch of live chat. gone are the days of 100% lead generation from a webform, the split has swung dramatically in favour of live chat which accounts for over half of all leads being generated.
To further cement chat as the prefered method, it is a “chatbot” conversion, i.e. when a web visitor engages with an automated “bot” which accounts for a quarter of all leads, with the remainder being generated through web forms and also telephone calls directly into the sales line promoted on the website.
So what does this mean for the bottom line? Well, quite a lot actually. Gamma has seen a huge increase in the impact of web-generated leads into the business which now contributes to around 70% of all “new business”.
What are the next steps?
Simply put, you need to give your prospects a hotline to your business. As this blog has shown, there has been a rapid shift in buyer behaviour with the advent of new technologies and consumer technology changing the expectations of B2B buyers. Our key takeaways from this are three simple steps:
- Reduce friction by making it easy for your prospects to engage with you
- Deanonymize traffic so you know who is visiting. Not all prospects are created equal.
- Make your conversations personal to increase the chance of success
To learn more about how Gamma can help your business succeed with digital lead generation, don’t forget to contact your account manager to see how Gamma’s partner team can best help you maximise your marketing tactics!
