OK look. You’ve heard us talking about how we don’t use forms here at Drift and the #noforms movement in general.
And it’s been great. We’ve seen unprecedented hypergrowth by generating leads 100% through messaging. And so have our customers.
But I have a little secret for you. Replacing your forms isn’t the best place to start with conversational marketing.
Nope. We’ll get there eventually.
The best place to start (and the best way to really dip your toes into conversational marketing) is by adding Drift chatbots to your site – in addition – to your forms. We call it the Second Net.
Why do we call it the Second Net? Because this play is like an added layer of insurance for your site.
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Here’s the thing. You have visitors who come to your site, but the second they see a form, the experience changes. By putting a chatbot on your form page, you’re essentially building a second net. The purpose? To catch those visitors who don’t want to fill out a form and wait for their questions to be answered. Or maybe you have visitors who are ready to book a demo right now, and as soon as they see a form, it’s game over.
This is where the Second Net comes into play. You use it to proactively reach out to people who want more information from you. It gives them a fastlane to your team.
Need more convincing? Here’s why you should be implementing the Second Net on your website:
- You give people the choice of filling out your form or going through your bot. This means you are meeting the buyers where they are.
- You can proactively engage with the buyers on your site who are showing high intent to buy your product. They might be intimidated by the number of fields they need to fill out on your form. By giving them an easy way to get in touch with you, you can drive more conversations with people who want to work with you.
- This is the easiest way to understand how your high intent buyers want to talk to your team. Depending on how they interact with your form or bot on the page, you can get a better understanding of how to design more qualified conversations with your future buyers.
But hey, don’t take our word for it. We don’t have forms on our site.
But you know what? Our customers do. And they’re seeing a ton of success using the Second Net play.
One of our customers, a social media monitoring company based in the UK, saw a 50% uptick in demo conversions just by adding a bot onto their “request a demo page”, which already had a static form.
Another customer, a customer advocate platform, is engaging with almost 30% of the traffic on their demo page with the simple message “Skip the form! Book a demo in our calendar here!”
To put that in perspective, the average conversion rate for a landing page is 2.5%.
And for those of you out there wondering what happens when your team isn’t online and available to book meetings – we’ve got you covered. A customer leveraging Drift on their pricing page uses the bot to book meetings when the team is offline. Right now, they book more meetings on that page when they’re offline than when they’re online.
That’s the power of having a chatbot on your site 24/7, to engage with your traffic even if your team isn’t around.
Now I bet you’re thinking to yourself, “Sounds cool and all, but isn’t this just cannibalizing leads from my form?”
And to that I answer: YES! That is exactly what you’re doing.
Because these are people who want to skip the line and get answers NOW.
So yes, you might cannibalize leads. But what you’ll find that these leads are the ones who:
- Close faster
- Spend more money
- Have a better customer experience
All because the intent is higher and you let them skip the line.
It’s kind of like Starbucks.
Some people want to wait in line to get their coffee. Some people use the mobile app and don’t wait at all.
They both end up with a coffee.
