We love getting customer feedback and questions here at Drift.
And, if you know anything about our marketing team, we love creating content — so we thought we’d combine the two and launch a new weekly video series called Office Hours.
To kick things off, Cara joined me to talk about what to do if your website doesn’t get much traffic (and the opposite: how to manage chat volume if your website gets a lot of traffic). Plus, we share a little pro tip to show you how to use Drift without ever having to install any code on your website.
We’d love to answer your questions on the next episode of Office Hours. To submit a question, just send me a message right here on my Drift Profile. What’s on your mind?
Video Transcription
Dave Gerhardt: We’re starting a new weekly video segment called Office Hours. We’re going to start taking customer questions and answering them live every Friday on video. I’m Dave Gerhardt. I’m the director of marketing here at Drift.
Cara Herrick: I’m Cara Herrick and I am a customer success manager here at Drift.
Dave: We wanted to start a new little video series based around customers and how they’re actually using our product because we get a million questions. And you can always go to our website which is… What’s our website?
Cara: Drift.com.
Dave: Nice plug. You can go to our website at any time and ask a question. Each week we want to actually take questions from our customers and from the people using Drift every day and answer them in a video. I’m going to have a rotating guest every week. And so this week I have Cara. Cara’s one of our customer success managers here at Drift. On average in any given week, how many times do you talk to customers?
Cara: A solid 90. Phone calls, chats, e-mails, swag, hugs..
Dave: Anyway, today we’re going to cover three things. We don’t have any customer questions yet because this is the first episode. We want you to subscribe to our YouTube channel — brand new thing. We have a blog. We have a website. We have a podcast. But our YouTube channel, it’s pretty fire. And it’s growing so you should go check it out.
Subscribe and that’s the easiest way to send us questions every week. Hopefully next week we’re on here actually answering people’s questions. Cara and I did a little brainstorm before this and we kind of came up with three of the things that a lot of new customers ask us. So we’re going to talk about them and hopefully it’s helpful.
Topic #1: Low Traffic And Low Engagement
Dave: Let’s talk about the first thing. Number one thing that we hear … really depends on the size of the business, but a lot of our smaller customers, they come to you and they say … what?
Cara: They are not getting enough engagement.
Dave: People are coming to their website but, they might say, “I don’t have enough website traffic to get engagement and get conversations started with Drift.” This is something that comes up a lot. Customers say to you, “I might not be getting enough engagement.” What’s the first thing that to do?
Cara: Go to their website, see where they have Drift up and often times it’s not everywhere. It’s on one page. They might just have the welcome message up. You need to make use of it everywhere. Just put it everywhere. Have some fun with it.
Dave: If you’re not getting a lot of engagement, number one thing: Cara has seen your website. Put it on every page first and then let’s let that run for a week or two weeks. The other thing is it’s also about the message. It’s not just about the medium, so it’s important to have Drift on every page. If you just have a message that says, “Hey,” nobody’s going to reply to that. Some people are going to say, “Hello.” You’re going to get the really active people, but for the majority of people, they’re not going to want to reach out and say, “Hi” back.
Cara: Right you have to reel them in. Give them a reason to talk to you.
Dave: This is a ridiculous example. But, if you went to your website and you just put the message on every page and it says, “Hey, reply to this message and I’ll give you $500,” I bet you that even if you have a low traffic website, you’re going to get people.
But seriously, it’s really easy to get more engagement by testing messages, different messages on different pages on your site.
Cara: A/B, testing you know? Really figure out which pages you’re getting the most traffic on and what kind of people you really want to be talking to. Maybe put it on your pricing page. Maybe that’s the most important area where you want to be talking to people. Just do it. Put a message out there and see what happens.
Dave: That’s a great idea. The other thing is don’t just put it on your pricing page, but match the copy of that message to the messaging on your pricing page. Don’t just say, “Hey any questions?” Say, “Hey have any questions about pricing?” It seems so obvious, but if you go to people’s websites oftentimes the message doesn’t match every individual page.
Topic #2: High Traffic And Too Many Chats
Dave: That’s the easy tip number one. We talked about really low engagement. We also heard the flip-side of that which is, “I’m getting too many conversations. I have too much noise.” Number one thing is A, you don’t have to put Drift everywhere.
Easy way to do that, go to your Google Analytics or go find the person who knows how to do that and sort your most popular pages by how long people are spending on those pages. What you’re going to find is there’s usually two. The 80/20 rule applies here, too.
There’s usually two or three pages where people are spending the most time. Only put Drift on that site or page. Cara’s going to break this one down, but in addition to that, we also built Driftbot which actually can help you cut through the noise and only have the best conversations.
Cara: Exactly so he pops in every once in a while, he or she …
Dave: Doesn’t have to be he.
Cara: It doesn’t have to be he, pops in every once in a while, asks people for more information, who they want to talk to, and routes it to the right department if you have departments in your company. We also have an integration with knowledge bases which is really exciting. Sometimes we’ll see a chat come in and then Driftbot will have already answered the question. They’re like, “Oh great, that was the best answer I could’ve gotten.” We’re like, “Never gets old.” It never, ever gets old.
Dave: We wanted to solve two problems initially with the Bot. Number one was, “How can we route people to the right person on the team?” If you come to our website and say, “Hi,” the Bot’s going to reply and say, “Who do you want to talk to? Do you want to talk to sales, support, marketing, or somebody else?” The reason we did that is because we heard sales reps don’t want to spend their time dealing with support questions.
Definitely not. And we’re just thinking about K.K. Support people definitely don’t want to deal with sales questions, so we figured we can make that easy by routing the right conversations to the right people.
Then we noticed people would always come to our website and they would ask the same like five questions. “What’s your pricing? Do you have a Slack integration?”
So we’re figured, “Wait a second. We have all of these answers written in our knowledge base. What if the Bot could just go grab those answers and then serve them up to you?”
Cara: It’s amazing.
Dave: It’s a game changer. People will write into our website and they’ll say like, “Hey do you have an iOS app?” Before one of us can even reply the Bot says, “Here’s the iOS app link.” We have a channel in Slack called #DriftLove where we just share legendary Bot responses. The Bot’s amazing and it’s something that you can use on your website as well.
Topic 3: Using Drift and Drift Profiles Without Installing The Javascript
Dave: The last tip that we want to leave you with today is for new people who are playing around with Drift and have a free plan — people who want to check it out for the first time.
Oftentimes the person who signs up for Drift doesn’t have the keys to the website to get Drift installed. There’s actually a way you can skip the whole install process and test out Drift. If you click skip during the verify step … It’ll make sense when you actually go through … Then you can just go straight to settings. You can actually create your own individual Drift Profile, which is a single page where anyone can send you a message.
You can see how Drift’s messaging works without ever having to install the page on your own site. It’s basically like getting a customizable landing page for your own. Profiles is also just a cool way to have more conversations with people. I know that Cara has a link to her profile page in her email signature.
Cara: That’s right. We call Profiles your digital business card. It’s a great way for you to give somebody a really quick link and they can view your profile, and see any fun fact that you have about yourself. They have a link to your calendar, and can create a meeting just through your Profile. They can also chat with you directly through your page.
Dave: I don’t have that many fun facts about me, so it’s just like my bio. You got one?
Cara: I do. It’s actually on my Drift Profile. I can wiggle my eyes back-and-forth really fast and it makes me sneeze (Cara’s profile link is right here).
Dave: The other thing is you can also take all of your team’s Drift profiles and create a page called a Team Directory. It basically can replace your about us page on your site. Instead of a static about page you can have pictures for each one of your team members and make it so anybody that comes to your website can talk to any one of those people. You can check ours out. It’s actually team.drift.com. Send Cara a note after this and tell her, “Hope you’re feeling better.”
Cara: I feel better already.
Dave: Feel better. All right so this was the very first episode of Office Hours, new segment that we’re doing here at Drift to help our customers and just you if you’re curious about Drift, learn more about the product. Cara was with me today. Maybe you’ll come back next week.
Cara: Oh totally.
Dave: Or maybe you’re busy taking customer calls. That’s the deal. Office Hours — subscribe. Catch this video every week. We’ll be right here and go to our website, drift.com, ask us questions. That’s the deal. Subscribe to YouTube.
Cara: Thanks for watching!
Dave: All right, we’ve got to be done. I’ve got to get out of here. Bye. See ya.
Cara: Roll out.