Adding a live chat option to your website will forever change the way you generate leads. Instead of just hoping that people will leave you their details, you can make the first step to contact them.
It’s like hosting a party: you don’t want to simply sit in the corner and wait for people to talk to you. You’d want to approach them yourself to strike up a conversation.
Live chat helps you get more leads in two ways: by allowing you to reach potential customers proactively and by increasing the chances of your visitors starting a conversation themselves. When you integrate your live chat with customer data, you can make sure you are reaching the right customers at the right time, making your efforts more effective and more efficient.
Let’s take a look at how proactive and reactive lead generation work with live chat.
Smarter Chats Means More Leads
Whenever someone starts a chat on your website, you get the chance to ask them about their name, email, and other helpful information. Even if they leave your page without making a purchase, you still get to keep their contact details, along with a chance to make a follow up and a sale.
Depending on what you need to know about your visitors, you can change the questions offered in these pre-chat surveys at will.
Obviously, the more high quality leads you get, the better. By using customer data and live chat together, you can encourage the right visitors to get in touch with you or you can even target high potential leads and contact them yourself.
Reactive Lead Generation
When it comes to making the contact option on your website more visible, your hands are often tied. There is only so much you can do to make it more visible without messing up your website’s design.
With a completely separate component like live chat, you have much more freedom in terms of what you can do to make it stand out.
When the chat option is embedded on your website, it’s always available. Visitors can use it at any time, from any page on your website.
But what if you have limited resources and you simply can’t handle all the inbound chats? You can instead focus only on your most promising leads by hiding the chat window for those who probably wouldn’t find it that useful.
For example, with the Woopra and LiveChat integration, you could hide the chat window for users who just submitted a help desk request, as they have already reached out to your support team. This allows your reps to prioritize the leads and users who most need live chat assistance.
Now that you’re targeting the right user groups, you need to figure out how to make sure those visitors reach out when they need you.
You can do a bit of research and try to identify what chat label will convince your visitors to start a chat. For example, instead of using the normal Chat now label you could have something like “Schedule a demo” or “Ask our experts.” Suggesting what can be accomplished via your live chat can get you more chats and, consequently, generate more leads.
If everything else fails to draw the attention of a visitor, there’s always a fail-safe in the form of eye-catcher. It is a custom graphic that simply points to your chat window and makes sure that nobody can miss it. Just take a look at it, it’s impossible to miss:
Proactive Lead Generation
The biggest difference between a normal lead generation form and live chat is proactivity. Live chat allows you to generate new leads not only by answering chats started by your users but also to start the chat yourself.
To start a conversation, you need to issue a chat invitation. It’s like getting your foot in the door. When the invitation is clicked by a visitor, a conversation will start and the visitor will need to provide their contact details, netting you a lead.
Here’s an example invitation we serve on our contact page to encourage visitors to use our live chat since it is simply a faster way of getting an answer:
To increase your chances of generating a lead in this way, you can target specific groups of visitorswith messages tailored to their needs.
But who do you target? This is where integrating customer data and live chat comes in to power your efforts and make them more effective. When you combine customer data with live chat, you can use information about users from various touch points — email, ad campaigns, product engagement, and more — to find the right moment to target them. For example, you might want to target:
Leads who came from a specific email campaign
Leads who signed up for a free trial but did not convert
Leads who came from a retargeting ad campaign
Leads who have demonstrated strong engagement with your pricing page
Leads who encounter an error on your website
Leads coming from a particular region
What’s most important, these invitations are issued automatically once you set up the conditions for them.
The customization of chat invitations allows you to deal with problems like cart abandonment and gives you access to higher quality leads. Since you can choose which user groups will receive the invitations, you can use customer data to reach out to the ones that are most likely to convert at the right moment when they would be most open to receiving an invitation from you.
Using Data to Improve Your Approach
No matter which ‘mode’ of generating leads you use, you always should pay a close look to the reaction of your website visitors.
With the Woopra and LiveChat integration, you can dig a bit deeper into the data to understand what you are doing right and what could be improved. You can see not only if the visitors react to your greetings, but also what other actions they take when faced with your live chat and how they behave afterwards.
For example, if a visitor initiates a chat to ask questions about a certain product, you can see if they actually buy the product after the chat. Seeing if live chats lead to more conversions helps you measure how effective your live chat operations are.
Generate Leads with Live Chat
When using live chat and customer data for lead generation, you get four things:
Free leads whenever someone starts a chat with you.
Easy to notice way of contacting you, which results in more leads.
The ability to reach out to your website visitors and get leads proactively.
A way to constantly monitor and improve your approach.
And the best part is that the lead generation power of data coupled with live chat is just an added bonus. You will also have faster, more precise service that your customers will love.
About the Author: The post above was written by Jacob Firuta, Customer Success Manager at LiveChat, a Woopra AppConnect partner. Jacob is responsible for preparing articles, reports and other materials that help companies create better customer service. You can read more of Jacob’s articles on the LiveChat Blog and follow him on Twitter at @JFiruta.
