More Messages Less Calls

Discover The Easy But Hidden Way To Engage With More Customers And Get Ahead Of Your Competition

We’ve noticed a shift happening – customers are contacting businesses more and more with instant messaging, SMS text messages, and emails, and less with phone calls than they used to. This is great, but it comes with a catch! It’s super easy to know when your phone is ringing…but how do you know if you have a new message on Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, or any other 3rd party messaging platform? Don’t let these customer inquiries slip through the cracks! In this weeks episode we share some tips and tricks to quickly engage with these customers, and win the sales that your competition is missing out on!

Don’t miss an episode – listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and more!

YOU’LL LEARN

  • There is a rise in the ratio of non-phone call communications for customer contact from websites
  • Phone calls remain the most popular method of contacting local companies for service requests
  • Often times businesses are slower to reply to emails than they are in handling phone calls
  • Customers can easily contact many businesses via email in short order
  • If you can promptly reply to emails, you will stand out above the competition
  • Customers can also contact you via Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and other 3rd party messaging methods
  • You can use screen recording apps (like Loom) to record a message, and link to it in your message replies
  • Many customers choose messaging over a phone call so they can have a one-way conversation and avoid talking to a salesperson
  • Strategically reply to messaging with smart and informative answers, communicating your points where relevant
  • Emails and messages are easily shared by customers, so your replies should take that into consideration
  • Instant messages are much more intimate and less likely to get lost in the shuffle, compared to emails or phone calls
  • Messaging platforms like Yelp and Facebook will display your response (reply) time – a slow response time can turn customers away, and a fast response can gain you new customers
  • Find all your communication inputs and understand how and where you are getting new leads from
  • Use Google My Business to enable messaging (SMS) direct from your GMB listing
  • Use Twilio or Intrycks Call Tracking to integrate SMS on your business phone numbers
  • Integrate a live chat feature on your website to provide easy and immediate customer interactions
  • Make sure you have a quote form or contact form on your website that is easy to find and easy to use

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 28 More Customers Are Contacting You Via Messaging So Optimize Your Business To Take Advantage;

Jesse: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan, as always.
And this week, we’re going to talk to you about something we’ve been noticing with our
business and some of our clients, is emails versus phone calls. We live in a fast-paced
society. About how old is the iPhone? 10 years? Somewhere in that range, something
like that?

Bob: 2008. Yep.

Jesse: Really, in the last 10 years, especially, I mean, things have advanced at a crazy pace for
communications, and how we communicate with ourselves. How we communicate with
businesses. And we want to kind of dive into that topic today, because we’ve just been
seeing this data staring us in the face, and we think it’s relevant for everybody out there.
So, this isn’t exactly an SEO ranking episode, but it is something that’s all about
conversions. And I think it’ll help you in a tangential way for your rankings, by way of
having better click-through rates, more traffic to your website, it’s going to drive your
rankings with the signals to Google. But this is definitely something about handling
those customers and converting those customers to win more business, which is
obviously extremely relevant to all of us in business, too, just like the rankings on SEO.
So what we’re talking about here is, I think everybody knows one of our cornerstones
that we use in marketing is tracking phone calls. So we have tons of data website-by

website, customer-by-customer, for our properties, for our customers’ properties, on
how many phone calls we’re getting. And unique phone calls, at that. Per month, per
year, per quarter. And we’ve started to notice a slow and steady decrease in the number
of phone calls. Also, at the same time, a slow and steady rise in the number of

non-phone call communications.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: A number of months back, we were looking at this, saying, “What the heck is going on?”.
Some stuff didn’t make sense for web traffic, for revenues generated by phone calls
dropping. And as we dug deeper into it, it’s all these non-phone call related metrics that
are stacking up, which are a lot harder to put analytics behind, right?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: You got so many different ways people can contact you now. For phone calls, it’s super
easy. There’s one dashboard, here’s all the phone calls that come in. There’s a lot of
dashboards for all of this other stuff. So…

And we should give a quick asterisk here, too. Phone calls are still, by far away, the most
dominant part right now of any communications. For anything we deal with.
As a side note, we’ve talked about this in some other episodes, make sure your phone
number, no matter what you think after hearing some of this conversation here and
what you maybe want to re-do on your website, your phone number should stare
people in the face, it should be a color that’s bold, that’s sticky. It should be on there at
the top of your page, at the bottom of your page. It should almost always be visible
scrolling. If you can, it’s by far the most popular way that people communicate with
businesses so … Take everything else here with an asterisk to that. Phone calls are still
the most important.

But, there’s a shift happening, right?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: And for our company and for some of our customers that we coach, this has been
something that’s kind of hidden. So when a phone call comes in, we’ve been training
this for decades now right? The phone rings, go grab it. Two, three, four rings, you don’t
seem anxious. Like “Oh, that was four rings. I’d better get there,” right?

And from the customer’s side, you start getting that third, fourth ring, you’re like, “Are
they there? Is anybody here?” That’s how instantly we expect to get served, right? Now
inversely, if you’re in business, a phone call rings, you’re on the phone, you get an email
that comes in in your in-box, another phone call comes. You might handle three, four,
five phone calls, and then you get to that email, right? Was that customer any less
important on the email? No. It’s still a customer with the same inquiry. Nowadays, we’re
just used to being able to send messages now.

So the first thing that we want to talk about is, find a way to make emails important.
Sometimes you can have an audio alert on your emails, just a simple ding or “You’ve Got
Mail,” back in the day. But that’s it. Your phone keeps ringing. Right? An email, if you
even have it turned on, which a lot of times it’s not, you use your one ding and then it’s
done. That customer may have wanted a quick reply. And to a certain extent, if you’re
on Google, searching for a product or service, you can email three, four, five companies
really quick. Right? It takes a lot longer to call somebody and engage with them on a
phone call.

If you get an email from somebody asking about a product or a service or a price quote,
it’s possible they emailed three or four other people with almost simultaneous-

Bob: And I think we’ve all been down that road where we’ve done it ourselves. I need a
garage door. I send out three or four emails to a couple of different garage door
companies and no kidding man, I get a call a week or two later, “Hey, you want to …”
No, the deal’s done. It’s a $3200 garage door. Sorry bud, you’re late to the game. So and
that kind of dovetails into, from what I’ve witnesses over time, and with the evolution of
technology, we’re very comfortable emailing from our phones.

Jesse: Yes.

Bob: Right? You’re in the doctor’s office, you’re waiting for your x-ray or whatever it is …
Man, I’m going to bang out an email and get that thing done. And so that’s, things are
accelerating, our life is accelerating, we’re sending out emails in the bathroom or
whatever the deal is. We’re trying to get stuff done. And we’re expecting that level of
performance or responsiveness from a vendor or a company we’re trying to do work
with.

Jesse: This is completely unsexy, but I had something that was parallel to some of your
doctor’s office and bathroom talk there. I kind of felt like it was a small victory for me
from an efficiency standpoint here. I was in the doctor’s office with my son the other
day. He got a sports physical for going to school. And while we were waiting, I emailed a
company to get my septic tank pumped.

Bob: Nice.

Jesse: See the connection there?

Bob: That’s country …

Jesse: It is country. That’s real life. But quite literally after I did that, I was like, sweet. Like I had
nothing else I was doing outside of reading the Sports Illustrated. I’ve been needing to
get ahold of these people. I meant to call them, but I’m not going … I thought of it right
now. I was like, I can handle this. I’m not going to call them because we may need to go
in in just a second here. Literally banged out an email to them real quick trying to get
some service set up to come take care of that. Within 15 seconds I was done. So I didn’t
email them because I didn’t want to socially interact with them. I’m not adverse to that.
It was just a speed and a convenience thing for me. But I could multi-task. I could do this
thing real quick.

And like you said, because I had my phone in my hand which is a fairly new convention
for us still, with that this little septic pumping company, a few days later I got a phone
call which was what I expected. I just wanted to initiate that. But if this is more of a local
service … Like this-

Bob: It all goes downhill, doesn’t it?

Jesse: It does all go downhill. But with this, I wasn’t shopping septic companies. I didn’t expect
this speed of service, but back to our point … If somebody’s on Google searching and
they fill out maybe some contact forms on your website or they just e-mail you off your
website, your speed of contacting them back can win or lose you business in the same
way that answering the phone or not did. And in business, I think we’re not quite caught
up yet to operating in that speed. Or at least most of us out there.

And I think this is an area that our listeners and everybody out there … If you can start
to put some focus on this, and some of this we’re going to talk about here, you can get
ahead of the pack in your local area. There’s no way that everybody’s going to be
operating at this speed, or give these things this kind of credence. If everybody listening,
challenge yourself for the same scenarios we’re talking about where we get these
responses hours or days or even weeks later. On emails or contact forms you submitted,
that’s kind of the proof that you needed. How’s that being handled in your business?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: How important is it? And let’s compound this for a minute. You have Facebook, you’ve
got Twitter, you’ve got Yelp, what else? LinkedIn …

Bob: Facebook Messenger …

Jesse: Google My Business. Yeah. This is not just a phone call and email thing. This is a phone
call and non-phone call for communications. So even if somehow you were to set up
some kind of audio alert on your email, well, it rang like a phone call would ring until
you replied or opened the email, which I don’t know if that exists. If it does exist
somebody contact us at intrycks.com/show, we can sit here and talk about that because
that would be an awesome solution.

But even if that did exist, that’s just for email. What if somebody hits you up on your
Facebook page and offers a post, or contacts you through Yelp. How do you make that
some kind of constant or in your face alert to get handled in the same speed as phone
calls because … Take Yelp especially. That’s a marketplace. In a sense, it’s not,
technically I know. But people on there are not just searching for things, they’re looking
to buy or to shop or to pay money somewhere. They can definitely fire off their issue to
two or three companies real quick and if you’re not getting back to them quickly,
somebody else did and you’re done.

Bob: That’s a good point. If somebody had a product, they could agglomerate all those and
just ring your bell every time something happens, you’re in good shape. And I can speak
to email leads in that in a business sense, you always kind of … Email leads that come off
a form, we always kind of looked at them and, “Ah, if they’re that lazy … And all they
want to do is an email and they don’t want to pick up the stupid phone and talk to me,
how bad do they really want it.” I’m not going to waste my time or whatever the deal is.
Well, guess what? All that shifted probably a long time ago, but we have a whole
generation that they, a lot of them don’t have cell plans. In the conventional sense it’s
all data. And they don’t want to talk to anybody and this is how they communicate. So
you’ve got to respond and then you’ve got to respond accordingly. And this brings up a
topic … You may want to cut this later or whatever, I don’t know-

Jesse: Here it comes-

Bob: Here it comes. But we use a product called Loom.

Jesse: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Bob: And how you respond is really important in my opinion.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great thing to bring up.

Bob: Because Loom is this really cool product. What is it, loom.com or is it-

Jesse: I think it’s useloom. I’ll pull it up here.

Bob: Useloom.com. And it’s a really interesting product because you can cut a quick video of
your mug. You don’t even necessarily need to use your mug. But it’s essentially a video
audio whatever of your screen. Or something else. If it’s a Goozmarolly 5000 or
something that you’re selling or if it’s somebody that has got a problem. “Hey my septic
tank is leaking all over the place, da da da da da,” you’ve got an opportunity here. And
that opportunity is the person’s got a ton of anxiety and anxious and what’s it going to
cost and can you get out here. You can respond if they didn’t leave a phone number or
whatever … You can respond with one of these Loom videos, get your handsome mug in
there and just say, do the micro-type thing in a calm voice and say “Hey, Mrs. Johnson.
I’m sorry to hear that. We can more than likely take care of you this afternoon or
whatever it can be. We charge $100.” They see the look in your eyes and the look on
your face and guess what? They maybe will pick up the phone and call you.

Jesse: I think that’s an awesome thing to pose to everybody. Just useloom, as in L-O-O-M.com.
It’s free. And what it is, they have a desktop version they’re coming out with but it’s
basically going to record your screen, they’ll use your photo in there like Bob was saying,
You’ve got a mug in there, and audio at the same time.

So it’s super cool. If there’s something you can answer with what you’re showing on
your screen, that’s an easy way to capture that. You can also, as it uses the webcam, you
can turn around, you can walk around with it and use it like a camera essentially. And it
posts it on Loom so it’s all online. You don’t have to send a file back and forth, you just
send a link, and then they can watch it so you’re not pushing a big amount of data back
and forth, you’re just replying with a link. Super super useful. I’ll put a link to that in the
show notes. And I think that brings up another aspect here that I wanted to get into
which is-

Bob: Well I just to say something real quick.

Jesse: Go for it.

Bob: Once you send that video and they open it, it tells you they opened it.

Jesse: Yeah, you get an alert.

Bob: So it’s kind of sneaky that way, but you can use it in business. We use it a lot. If we know
somebody opened it, guess what? I’m going to call that guy back and say, “Hey, I saw
you opened the video. Do you have any questions,” whatever the case is.

Jesse: We got turned on to that, I mean everybody’s heard us talk about our reviewing
product, right? This is something that we use extensively for that. If anybody is ever
interested in ReviewLead, what we do as we go out, we do some Google searching, we
record this in real time. I’m going to search for this in your city. Here’s where you’re
showing up, here’s your competitors, here’s how many reviews they have. It’s a great
tool to illustrate these things that you’re finding online, especially for us, and you shoot
it back to them. And you said that we could kind of get that Big Brother aspect of did
they open it or not, and you can get some insight there. But just super cool, super useful
tool. And it underscores this, the way we’re talking about using it there, if you’re
replying to people. It underscores this shift in technology that’s not just about how quick
it is, but it’s also like we’ve been talking, it’s a one-way conversation.

Sometimes people like my example of being in the doctor’s office. Did it purely out of
time and efficiency. I had meant to call that place for a week or two. I just hadn’t gotten
around to it so I shot them off something as soon as I thought of it. Now some people
though may not want to have that two-way discussion because “I don’t want to talk to
the salespeople. I don’t want to be sold. I’ve done my research. I’ve kind of made a
decision on these two or three things, I just have a couple of questions I need answered.
I don’t want the pitch. I don’t want to waste 15 minutes. I just want you to answer my
question.” That’s important to keep in mind. That you can’t reply to an email like saying,
“Call me.” It’s likeBob: It doesn’t work. Because they don’t want, they would have called you.
Jesse: They would have called you. Right. So when you reply … We’ve talked on other
episodes. You should know the questions your customers ask. Let’s just say for
hypothetical reasons here there’s three questions everybody always asks you. If you get
an email with one question. Reply, answer that question and give them the other two
answers as well. Have that conversation one-sided. Don’t wait for them to ask.
Communicate what you want to communicate almost in a scripted-type way because
you’re not going to have that phone call. They contacted you via email. Keep it an email
conversation and understand it’s a volley. You’re back and forth and back and forth.
Treat it like that, have that context to it. Some people like myself will do that out of a
speed or convenience in an instance, some people do it purely to avoid the salesperson.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: They don’t want to get sold.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Whatever the reason, it’s a communication method. Don’t discount it. Like you said,
years ago you could discount it saying, “Well, they should just pick up the dang phone
and call us then.” People are going here by choice for many many reasons and if you’re a
local service business, which customer do you think is going to value you? The one that’s
busy, doesn’t have time and is just wanting quick and concise answers or the one who’s
calling around to people and things like that. I’m not saying one’s better than the other,
but more so saying don’t discredit the person emailing you or messaging you because
they’re probably really busy which means they could be more valuable as in the sense of
they value your speed of communications, right?

Bob: Yeah, and it’s that level of professionalism. You get an email from Lockheed Martin or
whoever the deal is and it’s, you’re probably saying, “Oh I’m just lumped in there with a
bunch of other people.” Yeah, you probably are. But guess what? Do something
different. Throw out a Loom video, answer his question and then two or three other
questions you know he’s going to have after that or she’s going to have after that. So
that engineer can say, “Yeah, this is, this is … These guys know what they’re talking
about. I’m going to give them a call.” Or whatever the case is.

Jesse: Another important aspect when you reply to emails to keep in mind is the shareability,
right? So let’s say in some cases, you might say to your assistant, “Hey, research this for
me. Get an answer for this, that, whatever.” Always understand that this could be
forwarded off to somebody else or shared within the office or used as some kind of
internal communication. So even if you think, well I don’t want to stuff in those other
two answers, like they only asked about the one thing, I don’t want to do that. You don’t
know what other eyes are going to get on this thing, right? Treat it as a professional
communication. Be super fast. Be super `professional. Answer these questions and
make that impact. You may never get a reply, you may never get a phone call back. This
could be your one shot to communicate. So treat it as such and don’t … The worst thing
we see sometimes is, “Hey call me back at this number and we’ll talk about your quote
that you need.” No.

Bob: That’s so horrible. That’s so horrible.

Jesse: They would have called you. So I’m going to circle back to something else we were just
talking about. Yelp, Facebook, and these other messaging platforms … There’s a couple
of things here. One, when people message you within those … Let me back up and re-
set this. Everybody’s got a phone. We deal with phone calls all day every day, right? A
number of years ago, emails stood out as a newer type of communication. Whatever.
You might get 10% communication in email, 90% in the phone calls, let’s say. Well now
today, I don’t know if it’s 50-50 or even better toward the email side of things. Kind of a
little bit saturated compared to let’s say Facebook messaging. If somebody Facebook
messages you, you’re going to read that. I don’t know anybody that can give me an
example right now where if I got a message I would just completely not even open it
and read it. It doesn’t matter who it’s from. It’s Facebook. It’s such a smaller
compartment versus phone calls and emails for spam or wrong numbers or things like
that. You’re just compelled.

Text messaging is probably somewhere between email and Facebook messaging. So
number one for a business, if you flipped that around the other way when you reply
back to these people. If they contact you via Facebook Messenger or let’s say within
Yelp, that thing goes off, there’s no way you’re getting mixed in with another phone call,
another email, whether they’re at work, at home, at school, whatever it is, that’s kind of
on a fast-track communication back to them. If you, again go back to understanding
about speed of service back to them, and then understanding that intimacy that each of
these channels kind of bring-

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: That speed becomes even more important. They can kind of visualize. They Facebook
messaged you. Even onto your page, even just post a comment and you reply. That’s
much more of a personal connection than a phone call back or even an email back just
because it’s their Facebook account, right? It just carries a lot more psychological
weight.

Another important aspect for, particularly like Facebook and Yelp, it displays as a
business your response time. So let’s just say Jesse and Bobby are full of crap. This really
doesn’t apply to us. Guess what? When somebody goes to your Facebook page, it’ll say
average response time one hour, four hours, twelve hours, forty-eight hours, you know
what I mean? Do you think a customer will think, “Ah, I should reach out to these guys
and see if they can help me or these gals see if they can help me with this product or
service.” They go to your Facebook page because that’s what they wanted to do.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: They see it takes you two days to reply by message. Do you think they’re going to
message you? No.

Bob: Probably not.

Jesse: They’re going to move on to somewhere else. So your lack of responding to the speed,
not only impacts that exact customer that you’re dealing with in that response, but
that’s public for future customers to see, too, right? So you definitely have an inherent
need to respond quickly to that customer to win that opportunity, but then also that’s a
stat. You’re going to lose or gain more business based on how fast you handle your
current customers. That’s a public thing. The world is flat. Things are transparent. And
all things technology. You can refuse to play in this arena and discount this stuff or you
can embrace it and run with it. If you do that, again, you’re going to be ahead of your
competition. You’re going to be leading the pack paying attention to these things that
other people aren’t.

Bob: Yeah. I love the statement … Business owners, “I don’t need that. It’s all word of
mouth.”

Jesse: Right. Really?

Bob: Guess what? That’s fine if you’re over 50 and don’t use any of this stuff, if your
customers are under 50 or it’s basically what’s happening. This is word of mouth. And
you can say it doesn’t matter.

Jesse: I don’t mess with that Facebook stuff …

Bob: Well guess what, anybody who goes to your Facebook page is going to see it. Average
response seven days. Like never,

Jesse: So I mean if you refuse to use it, you’re actually saying you’re bad at communication.
Like in a round about way. So the moral of the story on these things is, you’ve got to find
a way as a business to find these inputs. Who’s handling your Facebook messaging? If
you’re on Yelp, who gets the Yelp alerts? Where does the email come in. There’s all
these different ways of stuff getting input. Phone calls? It’s easy. It rings. It’s audible, it’s
tangible for us. How many leads are you getting on email, on Facebook, on Yelp, on all
these different media? How many leads are you getting? Who’s responding to these and
what’s your response time? Because I think if you had a metric on how long are people
on hold for, we’ve forgotten about that. Right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: But it’s hidden that it takes us four hours to respond to a quote on Yelp or a message on
Facebook. That’s hidden and it’s out of sight for us. You need to bring that up and make
it visible and have everybody on your team aware of that. Because right now, the
missing link like you said earlier is some system or solution to make that as loud and as
frontal as a phone call.

Bob: Yeah, we’ve got to make that, we’ve got to figure that out.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s a great idea. If somebody has that or has the means to do it, let us know,
we’ll share with everybody. But right now that’s not there. And as a business, again,
compound that with the fact that we’re seeing a shift from less phone calls to more of
these types of communications. You’ve just got to pay attention here.

Bob: Yeah. It’s not happening … It’s not hugely dramatic. I mean it’s percentages, but my
guess is as the demographics and the population changes that that will increase.
Jesse: Yup. Yeah, it’s a trend, right? It’s just crawling and creeping and if you can jump on
board now you’re going to be a leader and you’re going to win customers and win favor
and you’re going to stay out in front. So a couple areas … That’s all doom and gloom
there. A couple of areas on where you can get in here and start to make some
improvements for yourself. One is within your Google My Business Listing. There’s a
future called Google. It’s the messaging. GMB Messaging, I forget the exact term. But
basically you can activate the phone number on your GMB account or list a different
one and people can message you. So they can just click from their phone right in Google,
click here, send a message.

That’s a service provided by Google that they act as kind of a conduit inbetween there
but it’s super slick. It still hits you like a text message. So maybe your phone, at work,
maybe somebody has one up at the front or if you’re a sole proprietor, maybe your cell
phone. It kind of depends on your situation on how you can implement that solution.
There’s another product called Twilio, and I’ll link to all of these in the show notes for
everybody, where you can get a phone number, kind of like a tracking phone number
like we’ve talked before. And use that just for text messaging. You can route that maybe
to your email or if you want to mask it, like if you don’t want people seeing your
personal cell phone, you can kind of put this in between. So that’s what people are
messaging back and forth even though you’re using your phone.

And then you can use our call tracking product that we have actually. Any phone
number that people would procure from us and use on our call tracking system is also
SMS-enabled. So the cool part about that is if you had that at your GMB phone number,
not only are you tracking all your phone calls and getting all your uniques, but people
can text you on that. So just kind of maybe by using that you have the ability to text
message at your company. And the cool part about that is you can actually route that
through either that dashboard for our call tracking solution or you can set that up to be
email back and forth. So you can send emails that would get to somebody’s phone as a
text message. So your receptionist will say …

Bob: Yeah, now we can handle these.

Jesse: It’s super handy. So number 1 is kind of enabling these things, being aware of these
things and then number 2 is really starting to take advantage of them and embrace
them. How can we do these better, faster, and more visible.

Another solution that everybody likes and I mentioned it earlier when we talked about
SiteGround is instant chat. The same kind of thing pretty much, “Ah, I’m not into that.
They have my phone number. People can all me, right?” Or “I got this quote form. If
they want a quote they can just quote me.” Some people want to engage in the speed
of a phone call, but maybe they just don’t want the phone call. Again, this doesn’t mean
you’re socially inept or you’re less qualified as a customer.

I’ll give you a couple of examples personally for me. Let’s say I’m on a webinar. Like a
view only, not the one I’m leading maybe or whatever just to be clear here, but if I’m
just attending a class or something, maybe I’ll want to handle some type of tech support
issue, maybe it’s SiteGround that’s popping up. I’m doing a chat with them on the side
while I’m paying attention to something else. Or maybe I’m on the phone with Bob and
he’s just kind of ranting and raving about something. Just kidding. But you do a chat in
the background. So maybe you’re in a situation where you just can’t have that audio
phone call, right? You still want to handle something? Online chat. Super easy.

Another place that I use it a lot like using SiteGround is a great example, is I don’t want
to go through the phone tree, you know what I mean? Like with chat-

Bob: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jesse: You just type it instead of sitting there on hold, hold music, you type it, then “Oh let me
grab the other agent for you. I’ll transfer you over.” Okay fine. I may go back to typing
that email I was doing or checking my Google rankings or whatever the heck it is. It’s a
super awesome thing for multi-tasking. It’s not just for lazy people, it’s not just for
people who don’t want to make a phone call. There’s situations where that’s just so
much easier to get that service.

Bob: Yeah and that’s where my generation has to get past that and understand that there’s
people 30 years old who are making a half million dollars a year. And they’re cheetah
figures on their phone because they’re doing instant chat and other stuff. They have to
because they’ve got employees and they’ve got whatever and they’re not Facebooking
anybody and hanging out in My Space or whatever the deal is, they’re getting eight
times the stuff done that you did, even though you’re 52 and you’ve got two degrees
and whatever else, they’re super efficient, and you’ve got to adjust to that.

Jesse: And getting that on your website is actually real easy to do. There’s OLARK, there’s a
couple of services, I’ll throw some links to some of them. We have no horse in the race
here but I’ll just throw them out for everybody to check them out. You can get these
installed on your website pretty quick. Especially if you’re using WordPress, a lot of
these have really easy integrations of WordPress and a lot of them have 30-day free
trials. Anybody even care if I have chat? Throw it up there. If you can get one a week,
two a week, one a day, decide for yourself what it is.

Bob: Yeah, it’s various. Try it. Just see if it applies … All these tips don’t apply to everybody
but if it applies to the septic tank guy, perhaps it might apply to your business.
Jesse: And really at the end of the day, circling us all in and kind of wrap up the episode here
too is people land on your website. Got to have that big huge phone number. Give them
all these other options. People want to text you, people want to email you, people want
to, let’s say instant online chat with you. If you’re not giving them those options, there’s
definitely a percentage of people and it’s growing, slowly but surely, nothing dramatic.
The sky’s not falling. But everyday that passes, more and more people are wanting those
options. We’re seeing that trend in Nevada. It’s a real thing. Well this is not just
propaganda. We’re trying to help you guys out in your businesses. Give these options to
your website, to your customers, and get them online. I kind of glazed over this one but
a quote form, or a contact us form. If you don’t have that on your website, make sure
you having that.

If anybody can engage you in any way, any questions that they have like having a
Frequently Asked Questions, just give people answers or the ability to communicate
with you without having to call you. Don’t force them to that call bucket because people
are shying away from it for a multitude of reasons. And if you’re not doing that, there’s a
good chance, if it’s that person, they’re going to click out of your website after finding it,
click on to the next one and Google and try to engage in that company that way. So,
obviously that’s the worst case scenario for you. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here.
So …

So hopefully that helps you guys out. Again this is the technology shift that’s happening
more and more everyday. Smart phones aren’t going away. Laptops, mobile ain’t going
away. This is just going to keep growing. So get on board now, get ahead of the
competition. Let’s jump into our five-star review of the week. We’ve got an awesome
five-star review here from @Shannonlmattern and Shannon goes on to say “If you have
a local business, this podcast is a must-listen if you want to be found online. I’m a web
designer and I just sent this podcast over to a few of my clients so they can understand
what the opportunities are to get more leads.” Thanks Shannon.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: I think this underscores something that’s pretty cool. A lot of people assume if you’re a
web designer like you know SEO 2 and marketing … These are different buckets. We’re
not the best web designers in the world. We don’t design websites to get awards. SEO is
a completely different deal. Right? It’s interior decoration and frame out your house. I
mean there’s different elements to your online marketing presence. So just because you
have a website doesn’t mean it’s optimized and can be found on search engines. I
appreciate you sharing that Shannon. I appreciate the awesome five-star review.
Everybody else you can go out to entrance.com/Itunes. We’d love to hear from you and
let us know what you think.

That’s about it for this week. Hope you guys enjoyed it and we’ll see you next week. Bye
now.

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