Taiwan: using LINE to【dramatically improve your website】

Hello, I’m Leo Sato (@slamdunk772), the CEO of applemint, a digital marketing agency in Taiwan!

In this blog, I’d like to introduce you to a special case where the efficiency of a website and the effectiveness of Google ads have increased dramatically by using LINE.

If you’re a BtoB company, I’m sure this would be a very valuable thing to read, so let’s get started.

What we did: LINE Inquiry Icon

First of all, I’d like to talk about what we did. To sum it up, we added an icon for LINE inquiries to our website. Please see below.

By the way, Google also recently created a LINE contact button (first confirmed on May 6, 2021). I’m pretty sure we implemented it earlier than they did lol

A Taiwanese shoe brand called D+AF also has a LINE contact button.

To those who are not familiar with Taiwanese people’s method of text messaging, most Taiwanese people use LINE, not WhatsApp.

What’s great about this is that it allows you to reach out to potential customers, the so-called pipeline, who are just one step away from becoming a customer.

Don’t you often have something you want to ask, but don’t bother to contact them? When I wanted to ask a question about Adobe’s Creative Cloud, I simply clicked the chat button.

if anybody contact you via LINE, their line account will remain and later become a list of potential clients.

You can make a list of these pre-buying customers and send them step-by-step mails or sales announcements via LINE.

For those who are thinking” There’s no one to reply even if yoi install LINE contact button.” or “There is no one to manage it”, try searching for “LINE chatbot” on Google. You’ll find plenty of chatbots that can manage LINE for you!

At any rate, many companies are now adding LINE inquiries to their websites.

Why did I decide to add it?

The reason why so many companies, including applemint, are adding LINE Contact is to lower the hurdle for people to contact them by adding LINE Contact.

We implemented LINE in our website in order to increase the number of mobile inquiries.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the reason why we implemented the LINE button was because we wanted to respond to people who had a few questions, but not to the point where they would contact us.

There are often LINE users who think, “I don’t want to add some company’s LINE account!”.

However, it seems that Taiwanese people don’t seem to have much resistance to adding companies’ LINE accounts. My friend has added LINE accounts for many different services, and his unread line count is +999.

Companies that provide services to consumers, such as BtoC and DtoC, have the potential to receive a lot of inquiries if they introduce LINE inquiries. Complaints may also come through LINE.

If it is too difficult to manage, you can consider a paid chatbot. Until then, why don’t you try implementing it first and manage it by yourselves?

What were the results of the implementation?

Introduction of LINE

Our company has seen an increase in leads as a result of implementing LINE inquiries. Also, the increase in LINE leads (inquiries) does not mean that the number of regular inquiries has decreased.

Though unfortunately, there is one thing I want to be honest about here.

The number of poor quality leads has also increased. I’ve been getting messages with just a single stamp on it, such as, “Hello”.

I once had a conversation with an owner of a restaurant in Taipei and he said something interesting to me. He said that the lower the bar for reservations and bookings, the higher the cancellation rate. That is exactly the case here too, in which the hurdle of inquiries has been lowered and it led to low-quality messages.

At the same time, something good also happened. For a BtoB company that we help with Google ads, adding a contact button on LINE increased the CV of their Google ads, which means that more companies contacted them on LINE after entering their site from Google ads.

In summary, I believe that adding a LINE inquiry button has the following advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages and Disadvantages of LINE contact button

• Advantages:
  ・The number of inquiries will increase.
  ・If you are doing digital advertising, the number of CVs from digital advertising will increase (BtoB)
  
• Disadvantages:
  ・Poor quality inquiries will come.
  ・It is troublesome to respond to poor quality inquiries.

NEXT ACTION

Although there are disadvantages and concerns, I also think you should try it first. It’s not like once you implement it, you can’t get it back. Once you have implemented it, if you get too many low-quality leads, you can just stop implementing it.

I think it’s a good idea to implement it, especially for BtoB companies. Since the total number of inquiries is small, it is unlikely that the number of inquiries will suddenly increase with the creation of a single LINE inquiry button.

Moreover, if you implement it together with Google Ads, you can expect to increase the effectiveness of Google Ads as well. Please consider this blog as an opportunity to learn more!