4 Quick Ways to Make Your Website More Interactive | Summer School Lesson 9

Video transcription:

Hey, everybody! Today we are talking about how to make your website more interactive.

Why do you want to make your website interactive? Because the more interactive your website feels, the more modern an experience it creates and the more it feels alive. Not in like a Frankenstein’s monster alive kind of way, but like a good client experience kind of way.

That’s what we’re talking about today. Here we go. Let’s dive in.

We’re going start basic and we’re going to escalate in complexity and coolness as we talk about the different ways that you can create a really interactive, cool website throughout this video.

1. Effective calls to action

We’re starting really, really basic here, but that’s because, unbelievably, there are still a lot of websites that do not get this basic thing down. The only place that you can reach out to them is to click on that contact page and fill out a form and and look for their email and their phone number and call them?

No! We don’t want to do that anymore.

This is the Web 2.0. Websites should put the user in control, and, if you’ve got a prospect on your site, you should let them choose what path they take.

So fine, keep your email and keep your phone on there, but give them better calls to action and better things do when you give them those calls to action throughout the website.

If you’re telling somebody “Click here to schedule a meeting with me,” what I want to see is your calendar embedded right there so they can pick if they want to schedule a call with you or schedule an in-person meeting.

Somebody who does this amazing is RLS Wealth, Justin Castelli’s group. The website lets you choose either one of these ways to meet. That’s interactive, and that moves the interaction forward. It’s a good experience because it keeps the reader on your website in control of their experience.

2. Use pop-ups and other animated elements

These deliver value to people visiting your website. You probably understand things like this. There’s banners, there are little corner pop-ups that that that rise up out of the corner of even the video that say, “Hey, subscribe to this channel and let’s talk marketing every week.”

But these types of interactive elements put things of value in front of people, catch their eye, and create that movement to try and say, “Hey, you’re here. While you’re here, let’s give you something of value. Here’s our latest ebook. Here’s our latest on-demand webinar that you can watch. Here’s a new podcast where we talked with somebody super cool.”

Those are fine on your blog. Those are types of things that you’ll have on your website.

But there’s also ways that you can surface those in front of visitors through an exit-intent pop-up that comes up or just through a persistent banner that’s on the top of the screen or some other methods that create a little bit more interaction and a little bit easier prompt to get somebody to read a piece of content or download something that you created rather than just always posting it to a blog or pointing them to a full fledged landing page.

Basically, the idea is make your content work for you in various places all over your website, instead of just living on a single page all the time.

3. Get some chatbots going

We’re talking about the little slider that says, “Hey, subscribe to our newsletter or download our ebook.”

But if you want to take that to the next level, and, this does require more work, you can add a chatbot to your website.

Now, you can do chatbots one of two ways. You can have your chatbot have pre-filled answers to questions and use it as like an interactive FAQ page or you can actually have somebody from your team monitoring chat. So, if somebody is on your site and they want to get into a live chat session to answer a question, you can actually handle that through a chat.

Popular chatbots include:

• ChatBot

• Instabot

• Drift

Note: When it comes to compliance concerns, not every chatbot is equal. Run your options by your CCO to make sure everything will archive as needed. If your compliance team won’t sign off on any of the options, we have seen advisors find a compromise where they implement chatbots that only feature pre-loaded (and pre-approved) replies—they never hand off to a live team member. Ultimately, the end goal of chatbots in such a situation must be to schedule an appointment (or download an ebook or subscribe to your newsletter).

4. Take advantage of interactive videos

This is like a choose your own adventure style approach to video. Netflix has been doing this to to really fun effect with some of their their shows where you’re watching the show and at certain critical points in the story, you pick up the remote and choose what the main character should do. It’s like the old school, choose your own adventure books. It’s very fun.

You can take those types of experiences and put it into your marketing videos. I want to call out the team at Helios who has done this to great effect. They just relaunched their website.

Here’s a little shot of what they’re doing.

So you land on the site and the welcome video is not just a two minute long video about “Hey, here’s who we are and what we do,” but it’s in 20 to 30 second clips where at the end of each you choose where you want the video to go and what you want to be about.

So, again, this is a user experience. It’s like the Web 3.0 where you’re putting the user in control of not just what content they consume, but what direction in the number of branching pathways that that content actually looks like. It’s almost like they’re building and assembling their own video experience in real time. This is really cool.

There are even more ideas than these 4 that we talked about today, but that’s all of the ones we’re going to cover because we’re keeping it short.

Make your website more interactive, and make it a really modern experience for your clients and prospects. Put them in control, give them what they need, and let them go from there. That’s what it’s all about.

That’s it for today. Summer school session wrapped. We’ll see you next week.