Does your integration strategy
deliver maximum value?
Here are 7 ways to optimize your efforts.
You spend a lot of time and energy attracting the right eyeballs to your website, and once you fish those leads in (fingers crossed), your strategically placed CTAs send visitors down the appropriate conversion paths. Chances are there’s a lead capture form at the end of each of these trails, and that’s all great!
The HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM platforms give you all the tools you need to generate leads and manage your pipeline, but there’s a key piece in the middle that requires special focus – talking to your prospects. All conversions start with a conversation, and that’s where live chat fills a critical gap in your marketing and sales processes. Use these 7 tips to ensure you’re making the most out of the SnapEngage + HubSpot integration.
1. Proactive Chat: Don’t rely solely on lead capture forms to fill your pipeline
Live chat is not a replacement for your lead capture forms, but rather serves as a powerful supplement to increase the flow of leads into your pipeline. Proactive chat is particularly powerful in overcoming the first hurdle of customer engagement: getting the conversation started!
Proactive chat allows you to target and send rules-based invitations to your most qualified prospects with advanced triggers such as time on page, page URL, geolocation, language, JavaScript variables, and more. Advanced programming allows you to automate the entire process behind the scenes in order to maximize sales efforts, while providing a personalized experience for your website visitors.
For more tips on implementing a successful proactive chat strategy,
check out this helpful guide: PROACTIVE CHAT 101
2. Lead Qualification: Combine the power of live chat and lead capture forms
As an alternative to proactive chat, another option is to use pre-chat forms to collect visitor information (name, email, phone number, etc) prior to the start of a chat. You can use these inputs to appropriately route chats to your team and better assist leads before they even get to your team. You can also map this information into your HubSpot contact records at the close of a chat. (See Custom Mappings section below).
If you go this route, please keep this caveat in mind: As with any form, pre-chat forms can have a significant impact on visitor engagement and have the potential to serve as a barrier. We recommend testing your forms to strike the right balance between visitor engagement goals and lead qualification.
3. Lead Scoring: Assign values to leads based on live chat events
Once you have a steady stream of visitors engaging with you through your live chat channels, you can begin to gather insights and assess the value of these leads within your funnel. HubSpot’s lead scoring feature allows you to rank prospects using a custom-defined scale that represents their perceived value to your business, based on various characteristics/metrics and actions/events associated with these prospects.
Once you determine how live chat fits into your customer’s path to purchase, you can begin to assign numerical values to leads from live chat events to help you make more informed marketing and sales decisions.
4. Custom Mappings: Update contact records with live chat data
The better you know your prospects, the more effectively you can communicate with them. Live chat offers an additional avenue to collect valuable information about your leads. With the SnapEngage + HubSpot integration, you can automatically map contact, company and custom tag information into HubSpot contact records at the close of a chat.
Learn more about HOW TO ADD CUSTOM MAPPINGS TO YOUR INTEGRATION
5. Workflows: Trigger campaigns, create tasks, and update lists based on chat activity
One of HubSpot’s most powerful features is their engine behind automation – Workflows! Via HubSpot, ‘Successful marketing automation relies on triggering relevant and timely actions, based on a user’s context. HubSpot’s Workflows combine the power with the context required to effectively scale your marketing efforts.’
So, why not add another trigger event to boost your marketing automation efforts? The SnapEngage + HubSpot integration allows you to easily select live chat event triggers to kick off your workflows. Pair this with custom mappings to segment, target and personalize your communications for more effective lead engagement.
6. Visitor Lookup: Know who you’re chatting with
The SnapEngage + HubSpot integration is not a one-way street. You can also use the integration to display valuable information about your visitors at the start of a chat. Once there is a known email address for the visitor within the chat session, either from a returning chatter (cookie-based) or through agent collection, you can display relevant contact details to your agents. For example, you may want to display a prospect’s lifecycle stage to an agent at the start of a chat so you can better tailor routing options and communications. Other sample data you may wish to display include:
- Lifecycle stage
- Account creation date
- Account type
- Account number
- Billing status
- …and lots more!
Learn more about
COLLECTING VISITOR INFORMATION AT THE BEGINNING OF A CHAT
7. Feedback Loops: Gather valuable insights to better guide your marketing and sales efforts
Live chat is an excellent opportunity to learn more about what resonates (or serves as a stumbling block) with your audience so you can better guide your visitor experience. You may start to recognize patterns around which pages live chats are initiated from, or trends in the types of questions being asked. This could serve as an indicator that the information on these pages may not be clear or could use further explanation.
You can also use operator variables in the SnapEngage Admin Dashboard to define and attribute custom tags to chats, and then map these tags into HubSpot to trigger follow-up actions and feedback loops.
Is the SnapEngage + HubSpot integration growing your business in other ways?
Share best practices and ideas in the comments below!