8 Tips to Improve Your Conversion Rate With Live Chat

Live chat is an interactive tool to communicate with website visitors. You can use it for customer support or to increase potential leads and fuel revenue.

Reports show that businesses that use live chat can increase their conversion rates by over 40%. 

Live Chat vs. Chatbots

Live chat and chatbots serve similar functions, but they are not the same. A chatbot is an AI tool that provides automated, pre-recorded answers to queries using flowcharts and decision trees. 

The differences between live chat and chatbots’ features are:

Chatbots can be a great way to reach out to leads during customer support. Combining live chats and chatbots is an effective lead generation strategy to maximize resources while offering 24/7 availability.

Benefits of Live Chat

Live chat is beneficial for sales because it:

• Is a cost-effective tool
• Increases conversion rates
• Enriches the customer experience
• Improves productivity 

Cost-effective tool

Live chat implementation involves paying a subscription fee and integrating it into the website. Businesses with live chat can reach more customers and pay 15-33% less than those with phone support.

Increases conversion rates

Live chat helps sell more: visitors engaged with live chat are three times more likely to complete a purchase. Live chat also shortens the time required for sale, increasing conversion rates. 

This tool provides continuous prospect engagement and allows special deals.

Enriches the customer experience

Live chat can improve client satisfaction. This means less frustration for prospects and an improved experience with your service. Live chat also has a personalized human touch that makes prospects comfortable while solving complex queries.

Improves productivity 

Your agents can engage multiple prospects with live chat, allowing you to resolve client issues faster and improving the overall productivity of your sales team. 

Live Chat Features for Lead Generation

Lead generation involves identifying and attracting potential customers for a business. Lead gen efforts target to increase quality leads in the sales pipeline. 

Prospects can show interest in your service by visiting your website, but this does not always translate into sales. Using live chat for lead generation carefully nurtures prospects’ interest to increase your conversion rates. 

Live chat is beneficial for lead generation because it engages visitors effortlessly. Sales leaders can work with these features to improve lead gen processes:

• Speed: Sales leaders should maximize live chat to provide fast, accurate, and direct responses to prospects.

• Customization: You can modify your live chat program with integrations and audiovisuals to boost engagement rates and ease user interaction. Your customizations should personalize the live chat according to each lead.

• 24/7 Availability: Live chat can work round the clock. Sales managers can delegate support staff and use chatbots to run a 24-hour system to generate leads. 

• Automation: You can use chatbots to push automated prompts and tailored messages to visitors on your website.

• Data Collection: Live chat makes it easy to collect feedback and lead information. This helps salespeople qualify leads and improve their experiences.

• Live Translation: The live translation feature eliminates communication barriers for prospects. It allows sales staff to build rapport with prospects and assist them in a language they understand.

Increasing Conversion Rates With Live Chat

Live chat can be the ‘slide’ that guides prospective customers to complete purchases. This tool can engage with potential clients and generate qualified sales leads for your pipeline.. 

Top sales managers modify different live chat features to fuel lead generation and ramp up sales. Best practices for increasing conversion rates with live chat include:

Reach out with greeting messages

You can use live chat proactively to send greeting messages and engage prospects before they ask for help. Messages like “Hello, how may I help you?” initiates contact and captures visitors’ attention.

Triggers are peculiar scenarios that prompt chatbots’ AI or live chat agents to send automated greetings. Some scenarios for proactive messages are

• When a prospect visits a particular page
• Time spent on the website
• When a prospect is a returning website visitor
• When a prospect clicks your webpage from a search engine
• When a prospect clicks on the live chat button

Collect email and mobile numbers during chat

Visitors who engage in live chat are likely to make a purchase. You can ask them to sign up for your email updates and SMS notifications. CRM integrations make this process easier, allowing leads to subscribe by ticking a checkbox. 

When using manual forms, ensure they are user-friendly and easy to fill. You can use the data collected for your marketing campaigns or personal follow-up.

Use pre and post-chat surveys

A pre-chat survey collects visitors’ contact information before a live chat conversation. The advantage of pre-chat surveys is that you always end with valuable lead information, no matter how the interaction goes.

Post-chat surveys evaluate your visitor’s satisfaction with the service you provide. You can find out if their issues were resolved, how they feel about your company, and if they’ll make the purchase. 

Surveys can either be short forms, a thumbs up or down, emojis from sad to happy, or ratings from 0 to 10. Your post-chat survey qualifies the leads and informs what stage of the funnel they are in. Positive feedback increases your potential to close sales, and negative ones help improve your customer service.

Personalize customer experience with CRM 

Your lead generation efforts yield the best results when you integrate your CRM with live chat. Your sales agents can access lead data in real-time and tailor the communication to meet customers’ expectations. 

All the information you collected prior to the live chat engagement helps the agents personalize the lead experience. You can use this information to group leads for lead generation campaigns that nudge them closer to conversion.

Use audio or visual media to streamline decision-making

You can personalize audiovisual mediums to guide leads to conversion with live chat. When chatting with a returning customer, you can escalate to an audio or video call with a trained sales agent to provide further guidance. 

You can use live chat for audio/video calls as follows.

Sales agents should be equipped for these escalations to improve customer experience. 

Maximize data analytics

Quality lead data is collected during live chat. Using CRM and other data analysis tools, you can gain valuable insights into your leads and take action to boost your conversion rates. 

Equip for mobile

Live chat must be responsive and navigable on mobile browsers because most web visitors will use phones and tablets. 

With a good user interface, you can simulate instant messaging between friends on live chat. Your prospects are more comfortable reaching out, and you gain more insights from those engagements.

Train sales representatives for live chat

Your reps’ training to use live chat for customer support may not suffice for lead generation. You can create training programs that teach personalization, tools, data collection, and answering techniques.

To improve customer satisfaction and conversion rates, your sales representatives must be grounded on the product/service they represent. You can use insights from the live chat analytics to improve their training, enhance customer experience, and boost lead generation.

After training, your sales reps must know

• When and how to initiate contact with leads
• When and how to get lead information
• When to offer promotions and discounts
• When and how to refer prospects to FAQs
• When and how to escalate engagements to audio/video calls

Bottom Line

Live chat is an invaluable addition to your lead generation strategy because it is customizable, instant, and improves your sales team’s effectiveness. With a few adjustments, your live chat can continually produce leads with the highest potential to make a purchase.