The use of live chat as a marketing tool has been growing rapidly over the past few years. If you’re unsure what live chat is exactly, it’s a tool that enables businesses to reach out to their website visitors and have a conversation with them in real-time. Doing so engages that website visitor, giving the business the opportunity to help the prospect with any questions they may have, and build a relationship with them.
A website is a business’ biggest marketing asset. As such, the goal for many marketers is to get prospects onto the business website, where they will hopefully go ahead and make a purchase. After all, marketing efforts are worthless if no one converts. So, if your website is your biggest marketing asset, you ideally want to ensure its optimised for those conversions.
Here’s how you can improve your marketing ROI with live chat.
Live chat allows for instant, real-time communication
Before live chat, customers had two options: phone or email. Phone calls would often involve listening to automated messages before finally getting through to someone, not to mention a lot of people hate speaking on the phone. Or, there was email, for which you might have to wait a few hours – or even days – for a response. Live chat filled this gap, providing an immediate and convenient channel of communication.
In a recent study by AberdeenGroup, it was concluded that live chat enables a compelling conversation between the business and its website visitors, yielding a higher conversion rate than other channels. While browsing, website visitors essentially announce themselves as interested prospects, allowing the business to take over the conversation and establish a relationship. As a result, live chat provided an ROI of a whopping 305%.
Proactive live chat can increase conversions from your Facebook or Google Ads campaign
Facebook’s recent algorithm changes mean that business pages are showing up less and less in people’s feeds. This means it’s now a pay-to-play game: marketers need to spend money in order to get their brand in front of people. As such, these marketing efforts need to yield high conversion rates if ROI is to be worthwhile. Similarly, Google Adwords can be very expensive for competitive keywords, so conversions need to be high to make back the money spent.
A prospect who has come through to a website via a Facebook or Google Ad is clearly somewhat interested. However, they may exit without making a purchase if they can’t find all the information they need, or if they get confused. Proactive live chat can reduce this by triggering a personalised, helpful message relating to the advert while the prospect is browsing. The chat can also be configured to trigger on exit intent – meaning that when the consumer goes to exit the website, they will receive a chat pop up. Website visitors who engage with that proactive chat pop up can ask questions and be guided through the buying process.
Proactive live chat is a valuable lead-capture tool
On average, only 2% of website visitors become leads. Many businesses use lead magnets, such as free downloads, to try and capture email addresses and convert prospects. The problem with this is that it’s a very passive and, arguably, overused method.
Proactive live chat enables a business to proactively engage with high-potential website visitors, such as users who are browsing pricing pages or FAQs, and spark a conversation with them. Once a website visitor has engaged in live chat, it gives the business a chance to ask for their name and contact details. These leads can be followed up at a later date, either through direct contact or by nurturing them further through email marketing through platforms such as ActiveCampaign or MailChimp.
Use live chat transcripts and reports for market research
As chat software collects and saves both transcripts and visitor information, it makes it easy to analyse the behaviour, motivations and needs of your website visitors. Combing through transcripts will provide insights into what users need help with most, or are asking questions about, giving you the chance to address those questions on your website. It will help you to pinpoint common pain points and work to alleviate them, enabling a better user experience for your customers.
Given that people are 4x more likely to purchase when referred by a friend, you want to ensure your customer’s experience with your business is as good as it can possibly be. The data and transcripts that live chat provides can be used to improve the customer experience and increase understanding of your target market.