It is very well known that a large amount of communication is non-verbal. For example, it is extremely important for salespeople to be able to read body language in order to gauge their customers’ interest and act accordingly. But with communication increasingly taking place online, how can these skills be translated into the digital world?
Traditionally, body language is made up of actions such as body posture, gestures, facial expressions and eye movement. Furthermore, salespeople can use body language to manipulate customer behaviour, by using techniques such as mirroring the body language of their customers. Obviously, this is all lost in digital communication.
However, there are other forms of non-verbal communication that are still prevalent online. For example, you can track who visits your website, when, how long for, which pages they look at, whether they register for your newsletter, etc. These all help to establish how interested people are in your product.
Social media has helped to make it even easier to analyse customer intentions. You can see what your customers are saying about you on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and a range of other channels. You can see who is ignoring your sales message. You can analyse how they talk to you, and how this varies from how they talk to other people. If you are proactively pursuing someone who is ignoring you on Twitter, you may be wasting your time. If someone you have never contacted retweets you, it may be worth giving their company a call.
What tips do you have for picking up on digital body language?
Can you give me more bibliography about digital body language it would be so nice!
ReplyDeleteThe skill and techniques you can employ in offline sales can easily be employed online too.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the beauty about online sales is that you can track your success far more easily than you can offline.
Understanding your client, finding their pain points and illustrating the benefits to them rather than just the features are all techniques used in sales appointment, but so to in any good ad/sales copy.
Techniques such as scarcity, money off, social proof, using non rounded numbers (£9.98) are also techniques that are used both offline and online.
Even asking for the order is just as important online than offline, using buttons/links such as "Buy Now" "Find Out More" & "Continue" are all one of the same.
Whilst there are subtle difference in the way you employ them, the application is the same and the reason for this is that at the end of the day, sales is a subset of psychology where you are looking to understand human nature and how to press their "hot" buttons.
So as a both sales person and an online marketer, I try not to re-invent the wheel too much, despite the internet driving more and ore sales, I apply those same techniques that have stood the test of time to generate the sale, both online and off, just as the biggest marketing agencies in the world are still doing to this day.