How Live Chat can help create a relationship with your donors
As part of our series of posts discussing the products and apps we use at Funraisin to help grow our business, we’re chatting about live messaging, and how this can improve that stat.
Live messaging will let you talk to your visitors and customers in real-time, from anywhere.
What are we using to improve this?
We’ve installed Drift - a messaging app you can install on your website to talk to visitors and convert more leads.
It’s free to get started and the setup is super simple. The screens the app will take you through when installing it are easy to follow and intuitive. We like Drift as it gave us an opportunity to trial live messaging on Funraisin.co in order to answer questions from visitors in real time. We’ve had a bunch of questions over the last month which we’ve been able to help potential customers with and steer them in the right direction. It’s also proved to be a bit of an icebreaker by allowing us to start conversations and show a bit of our personality (which as all product marketers will know is hard balance to achieve on your website).
Relevant messaging at the right time
Drift also allows you to get much more advanced with the targeting of your messaging in order to provide the most relevant information to people to convert to specific goals. You’re able to target by 1st time or 2nd time visitors, by the sites they’ve come from, and much more. One thing we’ll show you is targeting by what’s included in the link people visiting your site are clicking through on, in this case using URL parameters to determine the source of the lead and tailor messaging towards them.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re running some Google Adwords for an urgent crisis appeal following a devastating bushfire and highlighting what a $50 will achieve for those affected. Your ad might look something like this on desktop and mobile:
Desktop version
For the ad click through, you would enable Auto Tagging in your Adwords account (find out more about that here if you’re not already doing it) as this will combine Adwords data with rich post-click information provided by Google Analytics. This will add a parameter called gclid to your click through URL and its that parameter you’ll look for in Drift to allow you to display the appropriate message to visitors coming from that ad.
So, the click through of your ad would then be something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/gclid=123xyz
Using Drift, you’d now create a Campaign and choose from a Slider or a Takeover layout. I’ve chosen the Slider layout as the example - yes, it will display the profile pic of the team member assigned for the chat
Using the Targeting function, you’ll now create a segment of users to only show this slide out prompt to those people who visit your site from the Google Adwords Bushfire Appeal campaign you have running:
When defining the Display of Adwords Bushfire Appeal in Drift you’ll then set the rules about what parameters are contained in the URL. In this case we’re going to look for gclid=123xyz
The Slider will appear on your site across all pages (it doesn’t have to appear on all pages, but in this example that’s what we’ll set it to) until the preview message is either closed by the supporter or they open it to find out more. The copy in the Slider reinforces the Ad they’ve seen, encouraging a $50 donation toward the crisis appeal and carries through a consistent message from what they clicked through from on the Ad in the first place. And the benefit is it will display to your supporter across your whole site, so if a supporter clicks through from the ad and wants to donate but also wants to find out more about your organisation prior to that conversion, the Bushfire Crisis Appeal message will be available until they’re ready to commit.
Now save that and publish the Campaign to your site when you’re ready and you’re done.
Other ways we're using Drift
Here’s a couple of other ways we’re getting the most out of Drift for our business:
- Connecting our company Slack account to Drift so that live chat message are sent to a channel in Slack where all our team can respond directly through the Slack channel and it appears back in the Drift widget on the site.
- We use Drip for our marketing automation and can conect Drift to Drip so that leads generated through the Drift chat can be automatically added into Drip, tagged and sent through a relevant journey to build a relationship via email with our customers.
- For our CRM we use Hubspot and we connect Drift to Hubspot so that all live chat leads also appear our CRM and are tagged as coming through Drift.
If you're liking Drift, here's some more useful resources
Although not directly related to the space we’re in (working with nonprofits to help achieve their missions), for those of you interested Drift also has a bunch of other useful resources like their Seeking Wisdom podcast and a Blog that shares a lot of info on their team learning's and insights into management styles and leadership from one of the Founders David Cancel.
I get a lot of value from hearing how their fast growth business tips and strategies are working and applying them to the work we do with nonprofits - whether that be to better structure teams that facilitate more effective communication with supporters, through to designing services and ‘products’ that organisations could be developing which create a more meaningful and longer term relationship with donors.
