Stop Yelling: 3 Free Ways to Connect with Your Customers

Sometimes text and pictures are just not enough to persuade your visitors.  They’re flat and one-way.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that investing in expensive  media or similar tactics will pay off.  I’ve gathered 3 free ways to connect with your customers, so you can begin experimenting.

#1 – Product Demos with Jing

Helping people understand the “look and feel” of your product is harder online. But, video can help you bridge the presentation gap.

Video is great for highlighting product features, doing value add demonstrations (ex: how to carve a turkey with an expensive knife), and explaining difficult concepts.

The folks at Camtasia have a project called Jing that lets you capture, host and share video all for $0.

#2 – Webinars/Screenshare with Yugma

Sometimes a more interactive presentation that lets your visitors ask questions is a better way to connect. This is especially true if:

• Your product involves training (such as software)
• Education about your value is important (such as services) or
• You have a noteworthy spokesperson (Rachel Ray excluded)

In this case, a webinar is simple and inexpensive way to tell as story about your business.  It’s usually in the for of a slide presentation (which you can create free with Google Presentation, part of Google Docs), product demo (see above) or a simple screen share.

Regardless of the content, Yugma is a good way to get started.  Presentations with a small audience (up to 10) are free and you get 15 days of full access when you join for the first time.

(Thanks for the tip Drew!)

#3 – Website Chat with Google Talk Chatback

One of the frustrating things about web analytics is that you get a bunch of data lumped together.  Even surveys are after the fact.  If someone has a question at that critical moment before a sale, what can they do?

Google Talk Chatback is one option.  It’s a new feature that lets you put a simple piece of code on your website  to enable them to immediately send you an IM to your Google Talk account.  They don’t need any software at all!

Obviously, you’ll need someone to answer these IMs.  It could easily become overwhelming if you get a lot of visitors.

You can start small by looking for pages that have fewer number of visits, but where questions might be more common/more important to answer, such as:

• Checkout pages
• FAQ sections
• Contact Us areas

Get the Chatback code here.

What are your tips for connecting with customers?

Tagged as: camtasia, google chatback, googletalk, jing, screenshare, webinar, yugma