Email marketing is a proven technique for building rapport with your prospects and customers. When you combine it with live chat, you can bump your conversion rates and improve the overall customer experience.
Creating a back-and-forth relationship with customers is critical if you want to thrive in business. That’s why keeping in touch through live chat will increase conversions by roughly 8 times, according to a study by SmartInsights.
When live chat is combined with email marketing, you can communicate in a way that fosters better customer engagement, maximizes conversions, and increases sales. Today, we’re sharing how to combine live chat and email.
Understanding the power of live chat
Through your online marketing activities, you’re driving traffic to your website. You have even been very effective in converting a high percentage of those visitors to your email list. However, how effective are you at converting visitors into customers?
The average conversion rate is between 1-5%. In fact, on average, only 2% of visitors end up making an inquiry or purchase. If the conversion rate of your website lower than 2%, for example, then you can up your game by engaging website visitors and prospects with a live chat.
If your website visitors have browsed through your web pages, then there is a level of interest. However, there may be something stopping them from buying. Maybe they have questions about shipping or don’t understand your product packages. When there is a live chat, you’re able to answer all the questions your visitors have.
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.
For example, through the use of proactive live chat, Intuit was able to increase average order value (AOV) by 43% on its checkout page, conversion rate by 195% on its lead generation page, and sales by 211% on its product comparison page.
Using live chat to connect with website visitors
When visitors are on your website, they often browse through a number of pages. We can place these visitors into two categories:
- Those who are browsing and checking things out.
- Those who are assessing your product and are potentially interested in purchase.
While browsing through your products, there are questions going through their minds. This is why you should send greetings to your potential customers via live chat.
This encourages your leads to start a conversation with your customer support staff and they can easily ask their questions without having to initiate the conversations themselves.
How do you go about this? A visitor who has spent time on your website is probably checking things out. After a period of time, let’s say 5 minutes, you can invite your visitors for a chat. This would help you meet their current needs and show the visitors how much you care about them.
In fact, visitors invited to chat are 6.3X more likely to convert to customers than the ones who don’t chat. Also, 61% of those customers convert within the first chat.
You can also have specific events trigger live chat. For instance, if they’re on your sales page and you want to assist during the process, there could be an automatic greeting to the visitor.
Tagove triggers a live chat when a user lands on a 404 page so that they can help the user find what he/she is looking for.
Collecting a customer email address before chatting with them
When you offer live chat on your website, it is an opportunity to gain more leads by increasing your subscriber list. How do you do this? You have an email subscription form before the beginning of a live chat session.
Capturing a user’s email address means you can easily send them messages about new products that could be of interest to them. It also allows a better connection between you and your customers. By sending email newsletters that are personalized to your customers, you can even turn them to repeat customers.
For example, Maids in Black uses a pre-chat form on their website. The form has two fields, asking for an email address as well as the question. It also gives the user the option to either send an email to or to chat.
Encouraging your email subscribers to experience your chat session
Sometimes, customers don’t use features of your website because they don’t know they’re available. Live chat allows you to answer questions and help users through the process when they need your help most.
To increase usage of live chat, let your website visitors know about it. Invite them to your website to chat with an agent.
This is especially important when you send emails to your email subscribers. When you send them product offers, you should tell them that live chat will be available during the purchase process in case they run into a hitch.
This will encourage some of your subscribers to check out your product because you’re already offering a timely answer to questions they may have.
Wrap up
Having a live chat on your website can boost your conversions. The good news is that you can even make your live chat better when you combine it with email marketing.
You get more of your email subscribers to participate in a live chat session and you get your live chat users to become email subscribers. It’s a win-win scenario, no matter the approach you adopt.