How to Get x21 More Chances to Sell Online?

22% of people reading a negative mention about a company, would abstain from buying a product. While 4+ negative reviews results into 70% less sales. When a company grows, maintaining its good reputation becomes a key priority of each business. No matter what sector you are operating in, either real estate, car brokerage, telekom or consultancy, what clients write about your business online will affect your sales and revenue.

88% of users ‘google’ a product online before a purchase. Your Internet exposure means a lot in terms of customer acquisition as well.

With a company size steadily increasing and new clients coming onboard, it gets more difficult to track online mentions. Social media has become another touchpoint between a customer and it definitely shouldn’t be neglected.

Negative opinions spread like wildfire on social media and you can’t allow to bring it to the point of no return and a serious media crisis. With social listening tools you can effectively monitor what is said about your company online.

The need for speed

Clients are used to getting instant answers to their questions typing a question in a search engine. 39% of people expect an answer within one hour on social media. This matters even more when they are not satisfied with a product or service.

Another logical step  of an unsatisfied client is to connect with the support department and solve a problem. 48% of email complaints take companies over 24 hours to address.

Once a customer sees there is a little chance to get a problem solved any time soon, they spread the world about negative experiences with a product. This results in negative mentions on social media in particular.

You still can prevent bad comments from affecting your brand reputation. There are two ways to approach it – from the side of both prevention and reaction.

Wanting to prevent your customers or leads from becoming impatient, you should considerably decrease response time from support department on your company page. You can bring response time to 28 seconds – let’s come back to implementation later in this article and focus on the reaction now.

Marketing experts crack jokes about media crises happening mostly on Fridays This keeps them sleepless during the whole weekend. To spare your marketing department, you have to be able to find the first sprouts of the crisis online and respond in the manner that would pacify further comments on your brand and products before a crisis unfolds.

Even though you can’t fully control what people write about your brand, you still can react in the right way to show your company’s mature approach. Quick reaction helps prevent negative mentions from spreading around.

Quick reaction solves it all

With social listening tools such as Brand24 you are able to track all mentions about your company and products in real time.

Let’s research what people say about McKinsey & Company (consultancy firm) online with Brand24. The first step is to specify the keywords. If your brand name is more ambiguous like Apple, you would use “excluded keywords” section to filter out the results that don’t deal with the product or company.

Once you specified the keywords you are ready to check the mentions. When the platform has collected mentions, you may want to only see mentions with negative sentiment.

Having found a negative mention, you are ready to respond to it and restore  control over the situation.

Better safe than sorry

The second approach mentioned in the beginning of the article is prevention. After forging the right strategy for the response to negative comments online, you may think of how to prevent negative mentions in the future by increasing client satisfaction with an impeccable support service.

Once your clients have ran into trouble using your products they would want to get a quick response through your company page. You may imagine them filtering your knowledge base, F.A.Q. section, even writing emails or getting on a hotline. But that takes ages. With expanding access to information clients want to get answers instantly.

Contacting with a consultant by phone also matters in terms of getting specific recommendations for a very narrow or peculiar problem.

To help your customers connect with your consultant in under 28 seconds, they would have to take just three steps.

Your customer would click a connect button, then type their phone number to be later called by your consultant. This would be a much better solution to an automated hotline that drives impatient clients crazy.

Step 1.

Step 2.

Step 3.

Instant reaction equals more clients

So you’ve done your job with protecting your brand image by using a social listening tool. You have also managed to increase client satisfaction by getting in touch with them faster using a call window. Now you would want to drive more customers.

Brands that react fast to social media mentions and enable fast contact with the support have higher chances to acquire more clients in the future. Let’s see why.

Positive reviews and mentions about your brand help build trust among potential customers on consideration stage in a sales funnel. With social listening tools you could track how mentions with positive sentiment increasing and negative – decreasing over time.

The audience that will bump over your web page after reading a positive review, would check out your product functionalities. Once your potential client enters your page, they want to get instant answers again.

Companies tend to be sluggish responding to leads. But statistics show that 50% of buyers choose the company that responds first.

Lead Response time varies greatly depending on the industry. The larger the company is, the more time it takes them to respond – on average 2051+ companies respond in 1 hour 28 minutes. After submitting a contact form company from the healthcare sector would respond in 2 hours and 5 minutes.

It’s also known that companies have 21 times more chances to sell if they contact a lead in less than 30 minutes.

Short lead response time with a callback solution would help give fast answers in case clients run into a problem or want to ask about product functionalities – it all reflects on the level of satisfaction.

Summary

To sum it up, using social listening tools help engage with clients who are not satisfied with a product. Using a callback solution helps respond faster to customers substituting ineffective hotlines.

Approaching customer success from both sides – reaction and prevention helps build a solid foundation for new positive reviews to appear. You would only need to track them and engage with happy customers. As a result following this strategy would help you decrease lead response time and drive new sales in the future.

How are you forging customer success in your company?

About the author: 

Margo Ovsienko, Growth Marketer at Callpage who creates content that converts leads into paying customers for the SaaS industry. Before joining Callpage, she had been building sales funnels for James Cook Media and Growth Forge helping B2B & SaaS companies make the process of lead gen and sales more predictive. In her free time she is a host of Margo Leads
and Sales Leaders Talks.