7 Ways Live Chat Can Support Your Marketing Campaign

Many companies are spending a lot of time and money driving traffic to their website, but not supporting their campaigns effectively and therefore not seeing the conversion they had expected. The average global eCommerce conversion rates are between 2.86% – 4.31%, and around 13-28% for lead generation.

Many companies still think live chat is only for support queries and are yet to understand its potential for sales and lead generation. In our new episode of our podcast, Everything eCommerce, we talked about influencer marketing and the effect this can have on your business.

It’s all well and good driving people to your site and working on your marketing campaigns, but if you are still not getting more people to convert, there’s not much point. So how can you increase your website conversion rate using live chat?

1. Awareness of Marketing Campaigns

One of the key ways that live chat can directly support a marketing campaign is through educating the chat agents and keeping them up to speed with what is going on in the business.

If you are working with an influencer heavily on a campaign, then it’s highly likely that they are the reason for an influx of new traffic. If a specific item is connected to that influencer, make sure the chat agents are aware of this influencer and how the product is connected. Going from scrolling Instagram to clicking on a link and seeing the live chat directly address the influencer you clicked the link through can have a massive impact on how a customer relates to your business.

This doesn’t just go for influencers, making sure your chat agents are aware of your marketing, in general, is crucial. When a new advert or campaign is rolled out, give the team a heads up so they know where a lot of the traffic is coming from and they can be sure to address this in chat where appropriate. If there is a particular angle you are coming from in your advertising, the chat agents can be sure to match this tone on chat too.

Seeing a cohesion between all aspects of your business can have a massive effect on how a potential customer views and trusts your business. They see chat as part of your team, rather than an outsourced third party with little information on what they need.

If you’re struggling to do this with your own team of chat agents, consider a managed chat service to take some of the pressure off.

2. Up to Date Knowledge Base

As well as being aware of your marketing campaigns, keeping the chat agents up to date, in general, is absolutely essential. There’s nothing worse than going onto a live chat for advice and finding that you know more about the product than the chat agent does.

If you have a new product or service coming out, be sure to send this across to the team as soon as you have the finalised information, this means there’s no gap where the agent is lost and hasn’t heard of the item before.

The same goes for offers and deals. If you have a new offer or sale coming up, your chat agents should be some of the first to know. Make sure you are keeping up to date with new information and feeding this through to your chat, otherwise you risk some seriously awkward conversations.

If it’s getting too much to do all of this yourself, you could consider a managed chat option. With this, a team of highly trained live chat agents would do the hard work for you and you would have people there to do these checks for you and ensure everything is up to date.

3. Proactives

When someone is running errands and they spot a billboard, or if they’re relaxing and just scrolling social media, the advert becomes more out of context. They’re most likely not ready to stop what they’re doing and make a purchase at that very moment, but when they’re actively shopping, a targeted advert or message can be just the thing to drive them to action.

A recent study showed that people who refer to live chat on a website are 85% more likely to become customers than those who don’t. Additionally, Intercom research revealed that prospects who chat spend roughly 13% more when they make a purchase.

By using a proactive strategy you can target high intent pages and ensure you’re not letting anyone go. Common pages to target would be pricing pages, product-specific landing pages, pages with trials, sales, discounts and sometimes just the homepage. Looking at your website analytics is a great way to find out where you want to target customers.

You can also customise the initial message and make it relevant to those pages. If someone is looking at the pricing page, by popping up and asking them directly if they have any questions about pricing, you’re creating a personalised response right away and ensuring that any questions can be answered immediately, in real-time.

You can also get more creative with your live chat, and use a proactive strategy as an advert in itself. A very effective way to use live chat is to offer a free trial through it, and use this as a way to convert more browsing customers into leads. By appearing when it will affect the customer most, you can use to advertise any events that are going on, discounts, sales and demos, which can be a really effective way of creating an interactive advert.

4. Gathering Data from Chat

Another great way to use live chat to support your marketing strategy is simply to use the data you can gather through chat to inform your strategies, as well as optimise your website in general. Through gathering data, you can use this to send more targeted messages and increase your overall conversion.

There are many integrations you can add to your live chat software, some which automatically qualify and identify high-value leads, letting you know when to engage and who to not miss out on.

Live chat can also be integrated into your CRM, meaning that you can chat with returning customers more effectively. By addressing customers by their name and being ready with previous chat history, you can create a personalised and engaging experience so that they feel connected to your business directly.

By gathering information via live chat, you can then use this to collect information about a customer and follow up their query with an email or call or follow up with personalised marketing emails tailored to the type of content they discussed.

5. Objection Handling

Forrester reports that 55% of U.S. online adults are likely to abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question, and 77% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good online customer service. Live chat gives customers instant access to someone who can answer their questions.

Live chat means no waiting a long time for an email response or having to wait in a phone queue and talk to a pushy sales rep, with live chat there is someone available 24/7 to answer any queries.

If a customer is unable to find information on the site, or if they feel they don’t want to click off the basket page to try and find the information they need, having a chat agent there to speak to could be the deciding factor on whether that person becomes a customer or not.

How well you handle support queries pre-sales is always a great indicator of how you will handle it post-sales. The impression that you leave on a customer is going to have an impact on whether they will move forward with the purchase, as they will know what to expect from you post-sales, should they have any further queries.

6. Chatbots

Chatbots are on the rise, and they can have some benefit when supporting your marketing strategy if they are done effectively. If your chat team is not 24/7, there is value in having a chatbot live for the team you are out of the office, ensuring that there is always something there to engage with your potential customers.

A pricing page bot can be an impactful page to target high-intent visitors, so ensuring there is a chatbot with an effective proactive strategy can be a great way to attract new leads or sales.

A product recommendation bot can be a simple and effective way to personalise the shopping experience for your customer, allowing them to click a few buttons and let the bot know what they are interested in, in order to receive tailored recommendations.

7. Optimising the Sales Funnel

With your marketing strategy, you’ve reached out to a potential customer and piqued their interest, and now you need to channel them through the sales funnel into becoming a customer, and live chat is a great way to do this.

A study by the Harvard Business Review found that firms reaching out to prospects within an hour of the initial contact were 7x more likely to qualify their leads than those who performed their outreach after that period had passed. Connecting with prospects instantly allows you to retain more leads and speed up the sales cycle.

When it comes to educating the customer along this journey, and making sure they are considering the right product or service for their needs, live chat is an optimal solution. The sales process is often done with back and forth emails, calls and more questions needing to be asked. With live chat, the agent can charge through the qualification process and save precious time in figuring out if the customer is a right fit for what you offer.

Final Thoughts

It makes no sense to spend time and resources on your marketing campaign in order to get a ton of new visitors to your website, only to then lose them because your website isn’t properly optimised. Live chat can be a simple and effective solution for ensuring that your marketing strategy and your customer engagement go hand in hand, preventing you from losing out on leads and sales, and creating an amazing customer experience.

Catch up on our podcasts here.

Find out how live chat can support your marketing campaigns and boost your conversions here.

¹https://99firms.com/blog/live-chat-statistics/#gref

²https://www.intercom.com/blog/live-chat-for-marketing/

³https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads