Does Website Chat Really Work For Motivated Seller Leads?

You ever see those little website chat windows that pop up everywhere now? Seems like they’re on every site you go to. But do those actually work for motivated seller leads?

Are people really getting deals from little chat windows on their websites?

Well, we’ve actually tested them out. I put together a video going over what we found, breaking down some examples from high-level investor websites…

…AND sharing a new, free tool I found that’ll let you test this out yourself.

Check it out!

Mentioned in this video:

Express Home Buyers
Artibot.ai
Investor Carrot

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TRANSCRIPT:

All right, we are live. Welcome everybody. This is Daniel bear from adwordsnerds.com. how are you doing today? Well, I wanted to go live and just do a quick conversational piece about something I see people asking about a lot, which is these little chat windows that can pop up on a website.

Do these work for motivated sellers, do they work for real estate investors? What are we seeing in the marketplace? What kind of data we gather. I also want to share a cool free tool which would be really easy and free way for you to test this out on your own website. So let’s talk about this.

What are we talking about here? Well, um, chat windows or these kinds of things like start came out around like four years ago or so. You’ll notice these like little icons in the bottom left or right hand corner of the website where you can click on them and they’re generally gonna open a little chat window where you can chat with either a live representative or you know, something pretending to be a live representative.

And there’s been a lot of talk about, you know, do these work for motivated seller websites. Let me show you some examples because I think I’m seeing this in the wild is going to help you understand what I’m talking about here. Um, so I’m going to pull up the website of express home buyers.

Showing Website Chat Boxes For Motivated Sellers In The Wild

So Express homebuyers is a relatively big, um, you know, homebuyer company, I think they’re in Maryland or DC, something like that. Uh, you know, really great people. They do a lot of really good online marketing.

So I usually tend to, you know, if I want to see what people are doing outside of the ad words, nerds world, lot of times I’ll look at what Express Home Buyers is doing there and a lot of different markets. Now you’ll notice down here if I see if I can blow this up, this is the chat window right here, right?

So normally it would, it would look about this size. You know, I’m on this website, uh, you know, I’m a motivated seller just checking things out and I’m here. I’ve got this little window that pops up. It’s got a picture of this person here. Now obviously this is a stock photo, right? And it says, hi, thanks for visiting his first home buyers. That kind of, can I ask her and answer any questions for you?

And I can choose chat now, right? So I can like click this now what I’m going to do here is I’m going to say like a chat now. Cool. So he’s going to get name, email, phone number and address. Now notice this, this is an optin form. Even though it looks like I’m just putting in my thing to chat with a live person. This is actually a form and I am sending my information to this investor, right?

So it’s a way of adding an additional form. There is some, um, you know, there’s some interaction there, right? I’ve got the little thing here. It’s, it’s eye catching. So it’s a pretty cool idea. Um, and I believe if we go to on care.com, so on care.com, obviously investorcarrot, you know, they do, um, you know, websites for investors, but they’ve got the same idea here, down here, right? They’ve got the little icon, I can click on this.

It says hi there, we’d love to hear from you. I can start a new conversation. Now this one’s a little bit more involved or I can see that back in three hours. They’ve got real photos of people here. So this is really going to be live right, new conversation. Cool. I’m, I’m going to be able to send a message like I could say like, hey, you know, how much does this cost?

And then they’re going to get this as a message on their end and they’ll be able to respond to me and engage with me, et cetera. So they’re not doing the thing where they’re going to pull my information into the form, but they are kind of using it purely as a chat functionality. So really interesting. Right. And um, do these work for motivated sellers? How do these actually perform? Well, when we’ve tested these, um, they have actually not performed great.

Do Motivated Sellers Actually Click Website Chat Boxes?

We’ve gotten very, very, very little engagement with this kind of chat window right now. There’s a lot of variations on the whole chat window idea. So it couldn’t just be that we haven’t tested the right kind. I think if I was going to do this for motivated sellers, I would do something more like the express homebuyers thing where it’s really just a form is trying to pull up their information.

Cause that way even if it doesn’t work very often it’s still up in the conversion rate for the page in general. Getting more leads to convert. Right. So pretty interesting thing but in general motivated sellers don’t seem to engage with this.

I mean really see like a percent or less ever engaging with the chat window. Now why is that? I think is for a couple of different reasons. Uh, one I think it’s going to depend on your market because I think most motivated sellers are not particularly tech savvy and so a lot of people don’t really know that these things are there.

They don’t really understand them. And I think if you are like I’m a typical motivated seller and you’re just click on an ad or whatever, you come over to look at the website and you’re looking at this thing and then something pops up and it Kinda like tries to engage with you and takes your attention.

I actually think it raises the level of anxiety a little bit. I actually think that drives people or can drive people away from the site. So in a lot of ways you want to do this in a way that seems nonthreatening or maybe doesn’t take up too much of the screen.

I mean I think part of the other problem is if people are on mobile devices, I think it can be a little bit more challenging to like navigate with the chat window and then get back to the website and like what am I supposed to do? So in general when we’re talking about websites for motivated sellers, we want to decrease the amount of decisions they have to make, decrease the amount of options they have. We want to say like fill out the form. That’s what I want you to do. That’s all I want you to do.

Just do it right. And that’s going to increase the percentage of people that actually take that action. So that’s kind of where I think chat windows fall. Now there are a couple of variations on this that are really interesting and let me pull up one that we’re actually testing right now and then I’m going to show you a free one that you can try out because most of these are paid services, which got to pay for and they’re a little bit of a pain in the butts or install.

Uh, but I found a free one that we’re experimenting with now. Now let me, let me show you now this isn’t a free one, but this is the one we’re testing right now. This is actually, we just installed this on a carina who’s our in house web designer at Adwerx nerd. She built off the landing pages, all the websites for our clients, et Cetera.

Some Variations We’re Testing With Our Real Estate Investor Clients AdWordsNerds.com

Um, she, this is her website. So we are testing this on this first before we start rolling it out on client web pages. Very similar idea, right? This is the little icon down here. Hi, how can we help you? This pops in. Now what’s interesting is that this is plugged into facebook.

So what this does, when I opened this up to get this kind of like little message here and I can message her, this is a facebook messenger message. So what ends up happening is that I get that person’s facebook profile, I can see who they are, I can add them to custom audiences for facebook ads, so on and so forth. So it’s a really interesting thing. They don’t need to log in for me to get their information because everybody’s already logged into facebook on their web browser. It’s just really, really common.

Right? So really interesting. Go sends up to, you know, the message to the page. There’s just a lot of stuff you can play with here. If you are doing any kind of facebook marketing for motivated sellers, facebook advertising for motivated sellers, you know, getting people like your page on facebook, whatever it is.

This is a really interesting way to drive them from the website into the facebook ecosystem. Right? So really interesting. The other one that I want to show you is this tool over here. And this is the free tool I was talking about. This is called Artibot. So it’s at a r t I b o t. Dot. A. I, this is the website here. It’s really interesting little form. Um, and what this does is try to, like it says it uses ai here, but really what is, is doing is setting up kind of like an automated conversational flow that people can opt into, right?

So I’ll show you, this is, they’re going to show you the example of artibot here. And you notice a couple of interesting things about how artibot works. Very similar right here, right? They’ve got the little window, they’ve got the icon. I can click on it.

Now, one of the things I like about artibot is that it opens up this entire side panel. Now this could be bad, it can be good. It kind of depends. Um, but here I’ll kind of move this. I don’t know if my windows in the middle here. Um, now it’s, it’s interesting because this gives you a big area to play with right in here, right?

Big area to play with. It allows you to put chips and notice that there’s a gifs, whatever you want to call it. So it Kinda like gives you a little like non threatening thing and then it gives you the opportunity to put some, uh, automatic conversational thing.

So high. I’m artibot what would you like to know? And I can click these buttons, right? So what can I artibot do? I can click that, right? Then it’s going to give me some kind of builtin information, right? It can do all these cool things, right? What’s the pricing that’s going to give me a, an uh, an answer here and I’ll link to the pricing page, right? I can, uh, click other, right? I can do this.

Now, if you look at some of the customer showcases here, so let’s do, um, let’s look at this one. This got control company, okay. This credit company, right? So they’ve got this thing right here. So you’ll notice down here the already bought, um, call to action. Your start your debt recovery in five minutes, right? I can collect that. So I’ve got this person, right? I’m Daniel first it can you please let me have your name.

Okay. Now I don’t know. I hope you guys can see this. Let me move this. Okay, so this, this answer here. All right, says hi. I’m Daniel. If you have a few questions, I’ve been a member of the team, contact you. Firstly please let me have your name now.

What is this? This is a form. It looks like a chat. It is a form. Remember on the express home buyers website, right when we went over here and we click chat right in a click chat. Now it gives me a literal form right here. Name, email, phone number. This one is doing all of the form field collection, right?

So I can click damn. Cool. Hi Dan. So it’s already putting my name into the conversation, right? What debt recovery you need debt, debt collection or credit control. And I can collect. So let’s click debt collection for debt collection.

You can start your case immediately by filling in your information on the start your debt collection page. It only takes five minutes. Do you want to start your debt collection immediately or continue with a quote? Okay, so this is kind of interesting.

We could do this, we could do this for a house values, right? Continue with a quote. What’s the approximate number of invoices need? Collecting 11. I don’t know if that’s a lot. Let’s see. Approximate. So notice that this is a form. It’s leading me down a path.

So could you do this with, hey, what’s your name? What’s your email? Just in case we get, you know, what’s your phone number? Just in case we get disconnected. Awesome. What’s the property address? You can do this as kind of a Bot experience where it’s mimicking a chat rather than pretending, um, you know, rather than looking like a form.

So Artibot. Pretty cool. It’s at artibot.ai .

It’s free. To be totally honest, I haven’t really tested it yet. I just noticed that the other day. But if you’re looking to test this kind of broader category of chat windows and forms and all that kind of stuff already about free, uh, for a pretty fully featured version, um, it has a Zapier integration so you can zap the information into your podio backend and all that stuff. So it’s really, really cool tool. Free to check out, go test it.

Let me know what you think. Um, I think, you know, in general, I don’t use chat windows a ton for motivated seller websites. I like to focus on the form, but I think more and more, a lot of these tools are providing some really interesting experiences and depending on the tech savviness of your market, they might be really good. So that is dating barrier from Matt reserves.com. Hope you enjoyed this little session and let me know what you think. Leave a comment.

I’d love to get into it and see what other people are testing. And uh, all right, I’ll talk to you soon. Cheers.