Web Chat & Text for Lead Generation

Home » Episodes » Web Chat & Text for Lead Generation
There are pros and cons to texting and chatting with consumers from your website. Let’s take a quick look at both.

Generating Leads From Web Chats or Texts

The biggest question to ask is, does web chatting or texting from your website actually increase lead generation and ultimately, patient acquisition? With text or chat, the general rule of thumb is, the more information you provide online versus over the phone, the lower the lead generation rate. This is because most people generally back off from the website text or chat once they have all of the information they seek. At this point, they are just in the process of gathering and shopping for information.
"With a text or chat, the general rule of thumb is, the more information you provide online versus over the phone, the lower the lead generation rate."

If you aren’t acquiring personal information from them, such as a first and last name, phone number, email address or procedure of interest during the initial stages of the text or chat, you are likely entering a time-consuming event that won’t generate a lead. Be cautious and careful of this.

Visitor-to-Lead Rates

Track the visitor-to-lead rate for your website. The visitor-to-lead rate means that for every 100 organic visitors to the site, how many of them share their first and last name, phone number, email address or procedure of interest? Ideally, this rate should be greater than 5 percent.

Many practices are entering this metric at 10 or 12 percent. But there are plenty of practices that only have a visitor-to-lead rate at 1 or 2 percent. If you are using web text or chat services, but your visitor-to-lead rate is less than 5 percent, you could be spending too much time providing information that’s not getting consumers into your practice. Monitor this slippery slope based on the visitor-to-lead rate of your practice.

Time and Efficiency

Monitor the time and efficiency of the staff using the web chat and text. If team members are spending too much time on web chats or texts with consumers that are not coming into the office for leads, you are lowering the patient engagement in one of two ways:

1. With consumers who are in the practice. This potentially increases the phone abandonment rate.
2. By not responding quickly enough to email leads.

By monitoring the time and efficiency of web chats and texts, you’re also paying attention to its impact on other patient engagement opportunities within the practice.