Month: September 2017

Categories
Social Media

A Best Practices Guide for Live Chat with Customers Online

More than half of consumers say a business needs to be available 24/7. Implementing a live chat feature on your website can help with this a bit. When you consider that 42% of consumers prefer live chat because they don’t have to wait on hold and 51% of them use it for multi-tasking purposes, if your site doesn’t offer a live chat support option, you’re risking making nearly half of your customers unhappy. Perhaps the biggest reason to consider adding it as a customer service channel? 92% of customers feel satisfied when they use live chat to resolve an issue… that’s more than when using voice, email, or social media.

If you’re ready to start using it with your business, make sure you understand these best practices before you get started. Doing so will make it easier for your staff and your customers.

Aim for a Low Average Response Time

If it takes you too long to respond, customers will abandon the chat and become dissatisfied. There are several things you can do to make sure you can respond quickly.

  • Use Canned Messages: This allows your agents to greet customers quickly without a lot of repetitive typing.
  • Use Pre-Chat Surveys to Direct People to the Right Department: This ensures you can find out what kind of issue customers are having before they start typing. This information also makes sure your customers are being routed to the right department from the start, saving time for agents and customers alike.
  • Use Shortcut Keys: Setup shortcut keys for the most used operations, like your canned messages, to save time.
  • Use Other Media: Send screenshots, images, and videos to avoid having to write out long responses. This helps keep the issue clear, which helps solve it faster compared to writing a lengthy explanation every time.

Set Clear Expectations for Your Customers

Of course, you want to be able to respond to your customers immediately, but at times when the queues are particularly full, that’s going to be nearly impossible for your live chat agents. When this is the case, it’s important to set reasonable expectations for your customers. Do this by:

  • Clearly Communicating Wait Time: If a customer has to wait, let them know how long they’ll be waiting and what they will be waiting for. If you have to research their issue, or transfer them to another agent for any reason, let them know right away. This way they know you’re doing what needs to be done to take care of them, rather than thinking you’ve forgotten about them.
  • Stating Live Chat Operational Hours: If you’ve made your live chat available 24 hours a day seven days a week, you need to say that. If you haven’t, make sure you’ve disabled live chat on your site when your business is closed or agents are unavailable. Clearly display the hours live chat is available, so customers don’t expect you to be available when you’re not.

Be Human

  • Greet Customers by Name: This goes a long way toward good customer service, and personalizes the chat. When possible, personalize it with buyer history. This should be relatively easy to do if your live chat system integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
  • Make a Connection to Each Customer: Use representative names and photos to help your customers connect to you from the start of the interaction.
  • Acknowledge and Empathize with the Issue: Regardless of the issue, make sure your agents know to be sensitive to their needs. Acknowledge and validate their concerns, and ask the agents to think about how they’d feel if they were in the customer’s shoes. This way the customer sees you care rather than hurrying them along to get to the next person in queue.
  • Remain Positive and Friendly: Throughout the entire conversation, use positive and friendly language. Avoid abruptly saying goodbye. Only do this after you’ve asked if the customer needs something else and they say no. Tell them to enjoy the rest of their day and you’ve enjoyed chatting with them before logging off.

Be Clear with All Your Communication

  • Read Messages Carefully: Make sure you are reading what the customer is saying carefully, especially if you’re working with multiple tickets at once. If anything is unclear, ask for clarification. Working too fast means you could give an answer unrelated to the issue or send the wrong answer to the wrong customer.
  • Respond as Accurately as Possible: Don’t let speed take the place of accuracy. If you don’t know the answer, take the time to research before giving one.
  • Let Customers Know if You Need Time to Research: If you need a few minutes to make sure you can give the most accurate answer, let the customer know. This way they know you’re working on their issue rather than completely ignoring them.
  • Write with Proper Spelling, Grammar, and Sentence Structure: Don’t use speed to neglect proper use of the written word. Don’t use lingo or technical terms the customers may not understand.
  • Proofread Before Sending: Check for typos. Give agents commonly misspelled words and grammar issues so they know what to avoid and how to make sure it’s correct when replying. Let them know you’re using live chat supervision features to monitor the quality of the chats going out to customers. The second set of eyes will ensure you’re producing quality.

Treat Complex Issues as Multiple Smaller Ones

If it is too complex, it’s easy to get confused, and to confuse the customer. Break the issues down into smaller issues, and work sequentially through them until everything is handled. Some issues are too complex for live chat, and if this is the case, recommend the customer call for better service.

Offer Detailed Solutions

There are several issues that are likely to come up again and again, but it’s important to provide detail for them each time. This is where keyboard shortcuts can come in handy – agents who often have to send the same messages over and over can do so quickly, allowing them to get issues resolved faster and head to the next customer.

If you can’t assign a keyboard shortcut, keep a library of documents and videos handy that you can use to help the customer learn how to solve the problem. The alternate media may do a better job at helping them resolve the issue than a written step-by-step guide. Plus, they can

Encourage Self-Service When Possible

If you have a knowledgebase or FAQ area where customers can get help, or an article on your blog that would have solved their issue, always be sure to point them to the resource so they can use it in the future. You’re letting the customer know where they can try to solve issues themselves should they come up later. Be sure you reiterate they are always free to contact customer support if they can’t find a solution in the self-help library.

Give the Customer a Chance to Leave Feedback at the End of the Chat

Once your agents have closed the chat and made sure the customer doesn’t need assistance with anything else, give them a chance to fill out a survey rating their performance. You can also email them a link to follow up with, in case they close the chat window too quickly. Though not all customers will take the time to do this step, those that do will be providing you with valuable information about your agents are performing. And, the customers who do leave the feedback will feel like their voices are being heard.

Integrate Your Live Chat with Existing Help Desk Solutions

If you’re already using a help desk as part of your customer service effort, integrate it with your live chat solution. This can help you pull in offline messages and chat transcripts so your support team gets a better picture of the customer, regardless of which channel they’re coming from.

Don’t Feel Like You Have to Offer Live Chat Everywhere

You do not have to offer live chat everywhere for all your customers. You could just offer it to the sales team who will be talking to prospects. Or, you could offer it only to your VIP customers as an additional benefit. Many live chat tools make it simple to target your chat only to certain pages of your website, so you can control where it’s an option.

Learn from the Past and Make Adjustments

How many chats can your team handle at the same time? What do the customer satisfaction ratings for your chat customers say? How do those ratings compare to ratings on other channels? Talk to your team and see how they feel about everything. What’s working for them? What do they feel could benefit from a change? Make changes to the process where you see fit to improve the experience not just for your customers, but for your agents, too.

Categories
SEO

Step-by-Step Guide to How and Why You Should Create SEO Friendly PDFs

If you’ve been in SEO for any length of time, you know search engines can index PDFs, also known as Portable Document Format.

But, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using PDFs, and making sure they are as SEO friendly as possible if you decide you need to use them.

 

Pros of Using PDFs

1. Easy to Build

PDFs are some of the easiest documents to create, because all you have to do is save your document from whatever native program – Word, Illustrator, PowerPoint, and so on – and save as PDF.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can create PDFs within the program, without having to save as in the native program. This allows you to combine multiple files from several programs into a single PDF – even adding other PDFs to the file. You can also control the final file size a bit better with compression options found in Acrobat. This is not the same as the Adobe Acrobat Reader – a free program that opens PDF files.

You can take any information you want, from case studies and press releases, to presentations and product data sheets, and convert them into what’s basically a web-ready format in a matter of seconds. If you don’t have any kind of HTML programming knowledge, the PDF is a quick and easy way to publish web content.

2. Also Use Meta Data

Like websites, PDFs use meta data like descriptions and meta keywords. You can edit the meta data in any PDF file in Adobe Acrobat by going to File > Properties.

Meta data doesn’t have the impact on SEO that it used to but the meta description is basically a free sales pitch from the search results page. Write a description that not only tells your audience what they can expect from the file, but also entices them to click. If you don’t write it yourself, the search engines will choose the description for you – often using the first sentences of your content.

3. Can Use Links

Just like a webpage, you can also include links in a PDF. The best thing is, the search engine robots can also follow those links. You can set the anchor text of those links, too.

4. Content is Indexable

In most cases, all content within the PDF file is readable and indexable by search engine bots. To make sure the search engine bots can read your PDF, make sure it is created as a text file, rather than an image. Ideally, you should create the PDF from the originating program.

 

Cons of Using PDFs

1. Documents are Hard to Navigate Between

If you rely too much on PDFs for your website content, you won’t have a way to make sure your visitors can get to other pages on your website. Sure, your PDFs can rank organically, and if someone finds your file from the search engines, that’s wonderful. But, if they want to get elsewhere on their site, it’s not easy. They have to take the initiative to navigate away from the PDF URL to your main domain. Not all users will know how to do this, and not all those that do will take the time to do it.

2. Documents Can Get Lengthy

Since it is so simple to save a document as a PDF, it’s easy for the documents to get incredibly long. It’s not a common practice to break the files up into multiple smaller documents, so you could have a short document with a few pages, or essentially a novel with hundreds of pages.

While shorter documents aren’t really an issue, the longer documents can be problematic in terms of SEO.

3. Can’t Control Organization

If you’re working within a content management system like WordPress, PDFs aren’t going to be treated like pages, but downloads. This means you can’t control the organizational structure of the files, so it’s not an ideal approach.

4. Can’t Edit Code

With HTML, you have the ability to go in and edit the code as needed. You can optimize your images with tags and such, but you cannot do this with a PDF. If you need to change the PDF for any reason, you must go back to the source document and make changes, then recreate the PDF.

As such, you may run into issues with 508 compliance because you can’t add alt tags to your images inside the PDF.

5. Can’t Use Structured Markup

Structured markup can improve visibility in the search engines. Because PDFs don’t work the same way HTML does, you can’t apply the structured markup to PDF files at all. If you’ve got a cookbook in PDF format, you can’t use the recipe schema, which tells Google to include your recipes in the recipe organic search.

6. Can’t Track Within the PDF

Of course, you can track the number of downloads of a PDF with Google Analytics, but you can’t see what people are doing inside the PDF after they download it. You can’t even be sure they’re actually opening and reading the content. With HTML, you can use heat maps to determine the areas of a page where people are paying the most attention.

 

How to Properly Optimize PDFs for SEO

1. Use Text-Based PDF Files

When at all possible, create your source document in a word processing program like Microsoft Word. If you use another program, it may or may not be a text-based file, which means the search bots cannot read the content. If you want the content indexed, it must be possible for the bots to read the content.

If your PDF features images, it may still be indexed, but the content won’t be read. It’s also possible the bots won’t even index it at all.

2. Use an SEO Friendly Filename/URL

Your PDF file name will likely become part of the URL when you upload it to your website. As such, you should consider your keywords when you are naming the PDF. It’s easy to save it as whatever the program recommends, and you can do this, but it will mean taking an extra step to rename it once it’s on your server.

If the document comes to you and it’s already in PDF, do some keyword research and competitor analysis to find a file name that’s in line with user demand. As you name the file, use hyphens to separate words and capitalize the first letter of each word, to make it easier to read.

3. Link Internally to the PDF from Elsewhere on Your Site

It can be hard to include your PDFs within your internal links on your website structure. Generally, your PDFs are high value assets, but because they are specific, people won’t call on them as often as they will a product or a service page, for instance. As such, when looking at the site hierarchy, they often end up as orphaned pages, directly impacting your SEO potential.

Google’s John Mueller said in a 2016 interview: “If we are not able to index those pages[…] it might just be that we are saying we have enough content indexed from your website already. We are not ready yet to add a significant batch of more content.”

If you contextually link to your PDFs from other pages on your site, you’re telling Google they need to see these pieces of content, because you want them indexed and ranked. Though there isn’t as much significance placed on anchor text as there used to be, optimizing the anchor text on those internal links can help, too.

4. Compress the Images

Use a tool like TinyPNG to compress the images you’re including in the PDF file whenever possible. Your page load speed is a ranking factor, and PDFs tend to be larger files. Compressing the images helps keep the final PDF size as small as possible, meaning they won’t take as long to load.

 

PDFs and SEO

These efforts will help ensure your PDFs are indexed and ranked so your visitors can find them in the search engines. But, ultimately, your SEO goals for PDF files will be different from the goals you have for the other pages on your website. When someone downloads your PDF, that’s a micro conversion of sorts – especially if that’s how they’re entering the site and they’re taking the initiative to download the file.

Do you use PDFs on your website? Have you considered how they affect your SEO before? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

11 Tips for Using YouTube to Generate Quality Leads

When it comes to lead generation, most people go to obvious places like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads first. What this means is platforms like YouTube are often underutilized, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great place to be. (It’s a wonderful thing for you if your competition hasn’t caught onto it yet.)

Take a look at how to make the most of your video marketing efforts to generate more leads with YouTube.

1. Write Lengthy Video Descriptions

Writing a long, detailed video description allows you to optimize it for both YouTube and search engines. The longer and more in-depth they are, the better chance they have of ranking highly in the relevant searches. Contextual keywords are a major part of both Google and YouTube search.

When you write a long video description, I’m not talking about simply relying on single long-tail keywords. The detail you go into can help you rank for many related searches. It can also possibly boost your chances of getting keywords and phrases you didn’t use.

As you write, include multiple relevant keyword variations. Make sure the first few lines of the description are interesting enough to grab attention. Keep the most interesting information above the “Show More” link. Optimize this part of the description for the keywords you want to rank for.

Include a link to your website to your website in the first part of your description. Add a UTM parameter to the link to track how many clicks your video generates in Google Analytics. Make the link clickable by adding the http:// or https://, so users can easily get to your website.

Break up your paragraphs into bite-sized pieces to keep the viewers from getting bored reading. They’re there to watch a video, not to read an article.

2. Organize Your Videos into Playlists on Your Channel

Chances are, you’ll create multiple videos for a single campaign that all end with similar CTAs and send viewers to the same landing page. Group those videos into a single playlist to help nurture your leads. If your users aren’t ready to click on your CTA at the end of the first video, they’ll automatically move onto the next one, and the next one, and may find themselves more likely to click.

When you intentionally create playlists, viewers will bounce around on your channel longer, instead of potentially running off to your competition for more. The more content they watch from you, the more they’ll trust and remember you. Yes, there’s a chance they won’t convert right away, but they are more likely to convert at a later time if they’ve watched multiple videos on your channel.

3. Treat Your Channel as an Online Video Library

Your YouTube account will allow you to organize all your videos in one place, to create a library of sorts. Upload videos after they’ve gone out to your email subscribers, so new subscribers can look through the archives and see what they’ve missed before they came on board.

Use your YouTube channel to show other videos that may be appropriate for your audience, but not necessarily appropriate for email subscribers, like press appearances, for instance.

4. Use YouTube Cards to Drive Traffic to Your Website

YouTube cards make it possible to add more interactivity to your videos. You can add a call to action (CTA)with a link, to entice viewers to take the action you want. This feature was developed for mobile users, so it’s responsive on all devices, allowing you to send mobile YouTube viewers to your website.

When you add a card to a certain part of your video, a teaser will appear in the upper-right corner of the video for five seconds. If a viewer clicks or taps on the teaser, the card is shown. If after five seconds the viewer doesn’t click on the teaser, an “I” icon will be shown in the same area.

To add YouTube cards to your videos:

Go to your YouTube channel’s video manager and locate the video you want to add the card to. Below the video, click the arrow next Edit and choose Cards from the drop-down menu. On the next page, click Add Card and choose the type of card you want to add. Click Create. Customize the card in the next window. IF you choose a link card, add the URL you want to promote and include your CTA. Once you’re finished, click Create Card.

Choose where you want the card to appear in your video. Drag the marker on the timeline to the correct location.

If you want to use more than one YouTube card in a single video, space out the cards to keep viewers from getting distracted. Limit the use of cards to no more than three per video. Don’t use pointers or arrows to draw attention to the cards because not all devices operate the same way. It’s possible the cards could appear at different spots on the screen.

5. Direct Traffic from Videos to Specialized Landing Pages

Use the URL card to drive traffic from videos to relevant specialized landing pages. To get the best results, make sure you’ve designed a great landing page that’s entirely focused on generating leads.

6. Follow a Schedule for Uploading New Videos

To build an online following, follow a regular schedule for new videos. Whatever that schedule may be, stick to it. Make sure this doesn’t work against any other video marketing efforts you may be doing. For instance, only add videos to your YouTube channel or other video sharing shared after they’ve been sent to your email subscribers, so those members get the first look.

7. Use End Screens to Promote Landing Pages

End-screens are a mobile-friendly way to end your videos with a CTA. You can use the end screen to promote another videos, playlists, or channels. You can also encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel, use it to promote your website, newsletter, or products and services.

If you want to add an end screen, your video must be at least 25 seconds long. The end screen will appear in the last five to 20 seconds of your video.

Go to your YouTube channels video manager and locate the video you want to add the card to. Below the video, click the arrow next Edit and chooseEnd Screen & Annotations from the drop-down list.

On the next screen, make sure End Screen tab is selected. If you have annotations, YouTube will ask you to unpublish them.

Now, you can use a predefined theme, by clicking the Use Template button and choosing the template you want to use. Customize it as desired.

You also have the option to create an end screen from scratch. Click Add Element, choose your elements and add as desired to get the template the way you want it. You’ll need to include at least another video or a playlist. If you want to include a custom image, you’ll need to make sure it’s at least 300 x 300 pixels.

If you’ve already used End Screens in the past, you can import one of them from your other videos. Click Import From Video and click Select an Already-Published Clip. Edit the elements as needed.

8. Develop Your Goals Specifically for Your Video Audience

Let’s look at a scenario where videos will have different audiences:

Your video newsletters are a lead generation technique to build opt-ins and potential customers. With online video hosting sites like YouTube, there’s not as much insights about who is viewing your content. So, your goal should be to use video there to raise awareness about your company and reach people who aren’t already subscribed to your video newsletter.

9. Use Tagging to Organize Your Videos by Topic to Help Viewers Find Them in Search

Once you’ve added your videos to your YouTube or another video sharing site, tagging makes it easier for people to find them. You can use these tags as keywords to help organize your content. This not only helps people find your videos in search, but also helps your videos show up in related content, as well, so people can find your content when they aren’t looking for you by name.

Use keywords, and test a range of tags to see which ones get you the best results.

10. Respond to Comments

You shouldn’t expect potential leads to reach out to customer service if they have a question or a concern. A lot of the time, they’ll just comment on the video. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to and respond to the comments. You’ll have a chance to answer the questions, address objections, and direct them to contact you for more information.

This shows you care about your viewers, which goes a long way in building trust and relationships, too.

11. Share Your Videos Far and Wide

Promote your videos on other social media channels. Use the built-in Share function on YouTube to share it anywhere you know your target audience is active.

12. Bonus Tip: YouTube isn’t the Only Option

YouTube may be the biggest and most well-known video sharing site, but it’s not the only one. Use different services for different applications to provide the best possible customer experience while still reaching your goals.

Rely on YouTube for reach and exposure. Because they are the largest one, they have the largest audience to expose your content to.

Use something like Blip.tv to embed your videos on websites. This way you can rely on someone else’s bandwidth to host the videos, but you won’t have to deal with the branding/watermark issue like you would if you embedded your YouTube videos on your website.

Conclusion

YouTube and video is a great way to connect with your audience and show them more about your company and what you do. You can help them learn about your products and services. You can show them how to use your products and services. The possibilities are nearly endless.

At Sachs Marketing Group, we know video production and marketing can be intimidating, especially if you’ve got a limited budget and are nervous about investing in your own equipment. That’s why we’re here to help. If you want to break into video marketing, but need assistance with video design, get in touch!

 

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