Quote:
Originally Posted by DannyA
When you say chat traffic, are you talking about chat bots and stuff? I did that heavily back in the day and can't say I agree with much about what's being said here. Not only did it convert really, really, really good, but retention was ridiculously high for me. Incentivized traffic of any kind sucks but a great thing about this kind of strategy is you can laser target it without relying on filtering a ton of generic traffic.
Unless I'm confused about what this is referring to.
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He's essentially talking about direct sales. It's very effective for getting raw joins but the potential for abuse is huge, since programs have no way to monitor what is being said to customers to convince them to join, and the vast majority of customers joining your site through chat have no interest in it, they were promised something else in exchange for joining.
So programs that are not set up to filter that kind of traffic and lack the skills to closely monitor incoming joins will quickly lose their billing by accepting chat traffic.
Even if you are set up for it your biller may cut you off pre-emptively once customers start calling in with complaints.
The biggest problem by far is affiliates who stack joins to customers, getting each one to sign up to 5 or more sites (I have seen up to 20) until they cant even keep it straight what sites they joined and have no choice but to scream fraud and cancel their credit cards, charging everything back.
Finally, many programs and sites can rightly assume that a join equals a customer. However with chat sales, you don't have a customer, the chatter does. You have a join. Often a grudging join that is unwanted by the cardholder. Often the chatter will attempt to sell you this same customer over and over again. Last week I fired one for sending me the same customer 12 times in 2 days with a stack of prepaid cards.
Frequently chatters will talk the customer through a cancellation process and even coach them to get a refund so they can try to send the same customer with the same money to a second, third or umpteenth sponsor.
I have had chatters set up fake cancellation emails and send out fake refund receipts to customers to make them think they weren't spending money. I've had chatters call the customer service number pretending to be the customer and cancel.
It's a huge headache and if you don't know how to deal with it you should not get involved.