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Hey there,
House keeping note: I have switched from Tinyletter to Substack and I imported everyone in. If you are seeing any issues with this letter, please let me know. It’s meant for paid newsletter and publishing but I have no plans on putting this behind a paywall (yet) >:)
If you have been on Twitter this weekend, you might have noticed some interesting conversations happening.
I think they were two distinct events but both centered around Drift - the live chat tool that recently raised 60 million from notable folks. It was subject of some questions by folks like Pete from Databox and Dharmesh from Hubspot.
It’s interesting to note that Hubspot was the previous employer of the Drift co-founders and Pete (CEO of Databox).
What exactly happened? Here are the tweets:
When two competitors chat on Twitter about how their market is not a zero sum game and they should focus on the customer and just solve problems.
(PS - then they go back to making their competitive battle cards to sell against each other.) pic.twitter.com/MHyDkCRdd6
Politely disagree. Most markets are not zero-sum games, they're positive-sum games. Lots of potential customer value to be created. Customers don't want "winner takes all". They want many people working to help solve their problems. #CustomerFirst ☮️ https://t.co/FhenJ0jKWr
July 15, 2018Hubspot was the previous employer for alot of Drift folks and Hubspot has recently been rolling out a ‘conversations’ tool aka live chat for your site. So the whole product competition angle made this all the more interesting.
What else.
If you’ve been following Drift they’ve been pretty loud and proud about how live chat converts better then forms.
Pete CEO @Databox has been running some content programs where they do a survey of practitioners and publish their findings. One of their more recent ones is around ‘Do forms actually under perform compared to live chat’ - to be clear there’s alot of live chat platform out there, from Olark to Zendesk and ofcourse Intercom (which does more then just chat though).
Pete tweeted that the early results of the survey indicated forms actually perform better - not entirely surprising, different use cases perhaps (a longer essay for another time) which kicked off an interesting twitter thread:
Forms vs live chat -- which gets you better/more leads? https://t.co/4UUTfc028E
Responses are pouring in & so far, forms are crushing live chat.
Where are all the live chat 'conversational marketing' converts to tell us what's up?
cc: @handythinks @WebInbound @davegerhardt
My take: if your ‘bot’ is going to have 5 options for me to pick from, just use a form. Chat isn’t about bots (which aren’t actually bots) it should be about conversations. While we’re on the subject - lets not call marketing tech run on decision trees and if/else statements - AI.
Because it leads to situations like this:
All for today. I am trying to be more regular on this newsletter. If you (other then my dad who replies to every single one) enjoyed this let me know.
Cheers,
Kamil